Where do novels come from? Swamplandia is a brilliant collection of quirky family members who operate an alligator theme park in the Everglades. It's a setting as foreign as the moon, yet as accessible as sweet childhood memories. Here's more from author Karen Russell:
JR: How did you come up with the idea of writing about a family of alligator wrestlers?
KR: Well, these alligator wrestlers have been kicking around inside me for almost a decade now—I think I got the original idea when I was twenty-two, back in graduate school, and a little bit of a happy dufus when it came to story ideas. Nothing has changed, in fact. All of my story ideas continue to feel to me like bad SNL sketches or strange dreams provoked by spicy Thai food. I must be constructing this answer in the past tense so that it sounds like I'm making big progress in my writing life.
JR: The theme park angle of Swamplandia is brilliant. Where did that come from?
KR: I wanted to write a story about a child alligator wrestler, who lived on a park that was similar to the mom-and-pop roadside attractions that my siblings and I had visited as kids, both in the Everglades and on the outskirts of Miami. But I wanted this place to feel even more remote—to be far from the grid of mainland lights, far deeper inside the swamp than it could realistically exist (and thank goodness for that—the Everglades National Park does not need a tribe of costumed grifters like the Bigtrees selling concessions within its borders).
JR: This is great story about complex family relationships. Which character—or relationship —did you start with?
KR: I started with Ava and Ossie—it was their dynamic, that of a younger sister watching with a helpless fascination (and, later, true horror) as her sister falls in love with a ghost and begins to disappear from the world they share.
There was something incredibly powerful to me about the image of this child holding an alligator's jaws in her hands—and this kid became Ava Bigtree in a short story that I wrote called "Ava Wrestles the Alligator." Everything about that story surprised me—that the older sister Osceola was possessed by a ghost, that their mother had died, that they were so alone in that landscape. Two astronauts stranded on the moon couldn't feel lonelier to me, or more desperate, than the sisters who become the protagonists of Swamplandia, along with their older brother Kiwi.
Unlike the moon, of course, this swamp is their home. The honest answer, I'm afraid, is that I no longer completely remember how the story came into being, or exactly when on the timeline I knew I wanted to write an entire novel about these people; up until this point, I'd never written any story over fourteen pages, but the "Ava" story kept growing. And Ava herself wouldn't leave me alone, she was like a wiggly tooth. So in the end I guess it felt more like I capitulated to the idea of Swamplandia! than consciously developed and committed to it. It feels like a bit of a cliche to say this, but I really did feel like I had to write this book.
JR: What books are on your nightstand right now?
KR: I just got a sneak peak at Heidi Julavits incredible new novel The Vanishers. And I'm teaching Robin Black's If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This to my Short Fiction II group next week, a fantastic story collection, so that's up there.
JR: Previously, you wrote a collection of short stories. What was more difficult and easier about writing a novel?
KR: Well, I think both forms offer huge pleasures to a writer, but when I transitioned from writing stories to the long and messy first draft of what became Swamplandia, I was really in uncharted waters—this novel was far and away the most challenging thing I've ever attempted in my writing life. I have a sort of wall-eyed, somber respect for all novelists now—it's a true feat of endurance, I think, to develop a story over hundreds of pages. One of the things I most enjoyed was watching the characters like Ava and Kiwi change over time—the story form is so compressed that I sometimes feel bereft after finishing one.
It's hard to leave the world and the characters that you create after ten or twelve pages. I loved that I got to live in the world of Swamplandia over a period of years and really watch the Bigtrees' story come into focus. At the same time, I sometimes felt constrained by that very pleasure—once I'd committed to that swamp-world, I couldn't exactly blast into outer space on a Tuesday, I'd dropped anchor in Florida. And it was difficult to keep multiple story lines going at once—I really wanted there to be a few worlds spinning and overlapping in this novel, something I'd never attempted in a story. But I loved the roominess of the novel; I had so much fun writing it, and enjoyed switching registers from Ava's dreamier voice to Kiwi's more satiric sections to my first foray into what I guess you might call historical fiction, the Louis Thanksgiving section.
JR: What's something about your writing life that may surprise people?
KR: Wouldn't it be great if I had something genuinely surprising for this one? I have always admired those legends about Papa Hemingway writing while standing up, you know, these unbelievable tales —"I dictate my stories, while paragliding—drunk!" I'm even jealous of those writers who have some modest eccentricities, like writers who only use a antiquated typewriters or legal pads. I think this must be because my own writing life is so irremediably boring.
