PMH: I think that comes across in the writing. You worked on Esther Stories and The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo at the same, which I found pretty remarkable, and I was wondering, would it come to the point where you’d have to set aside days, or would one text intrude on the other? Would you sit down to work on Esther Stories and then find you’ve got Mavala kind of creeping around the back of your head?
PO: Yeah, I sort of like that way. I’m not very organized, so I wouldn’t assign days. When I was writing Esther Stories I was always very conscious that I was writing a Namibian novel. I was taking notes, and compiling work for Mavala, but I think at a certain point I had to put that away to finish Esther Stories. I definitely worked on the books at the same time, but once Esther Stories was done then I was free. I’m always sort of scattered. I wish I could say it was intended or that it works out, but I just have trouble focusing, that’s why. For whatever clinical reasons that may be.
PMH: You’ve indicated that you find it hard to leave some of these people, your characters. In the last two sections of Esther Stories you shift away from what you’d done in the previous sections, which were comprised of unrelated stories, and you link “Fall River Marriage” and “The Waters” by delving into two married couples’ lives throughout a number of stories. You’re able to explore the families of these two couples, and I was wondering if those two sections started out with people that you couldn’t really let go?
PO: Yes, definitely. I really love stories very, very much, as well as my characters, and there are times when you can’t leave them alone, even after you kill them. Like Walt Kaplan, in the Fall River section of Esther Stories. The first story I wrote of Walt Kaplan was his death. So he was already dead before I even knew him, I barely knew who he was yet. Sarah walks in and he’s already dead. So what I tried to do in other stories was resurrect him in my own mind, and in fact he’s alive in the last scene of that section, immediately following the scene where Sarah finds him dead. So, literally I did that and sort of figuratively I did that. Maybe I just don’t think linearly, so it kind of made sense to me that I would have somebody drop dead and then wonder, oh, did they once go to a conference in Chicago where they sat on a bed with their shoes on and talked to a friend…
PMH: That’s great. Now, you’ve mentioned you’re an obsessive re-writer. Are you as obsessive about ordering, because it plays such an integral role in both the novel and your short stories? The fact that you resurrect Walt Kaplan is so moving and it’s so effective.
PO: I don’t know when it occurred to me that it was going to be like that, I can’t really pinpoint it because it was going to end with his death, but I think one of the most fun things to do is play around with order. A lot of readers, myself included, will pick up a collection of stories and just read it without thinking about the toil it took for us to get it in that right order, so I can’t really condemn other people for doing it to me because I do it to them. But when stories are linked more, and I don’t necessarily like the term linked stories, because I don’t know what it necessarily means, as if they’re part of a chain? I prefer something more like saying the same family of stories, cycle, a story cycle, or something like that. Because linked makes it seem like they fit together like Legos. I think a lot about how the stories fit together and how they play off each other, how they shout to each other or whatever. I like the idea of stories speaking to each other, and I think that’s something I try and do by having stories with the same characters. That’s why I like novels, but there’s something in between novels and stories that I’m trying to do, I’m not sure what, but I’m trying to write something that’s not a novel and not a story collection. I feel very restricted by the strait jacket of a novel, like it has to have one arc or something, and I feel like a story collection that has less unity is good too but I want something more unified, so I’m trying to do something different. I don’t know. It’s like an obsession of mine that I really like books that are indefinable in terms of what you call them. Like what do you call The Things They Carried, is it a novel? Is that what Tim O’Brien calls it, I don’t know. Is it a novel?
PMH: It’s funny how we seek definitions, as if we’re forced to, like when it comes to marketing a book. Or, you’re describing a book you’re working on to a buddy.
PO: Yeah, like he just asks, So, what are you writing? Uh, I’m not writing a novel and I’m not writing a story collection.
PMH: That’s when the next question comes. So, what the hell are you doing then?
