What happens when two authors who have never met agree to interview each other? Join us as we launch our brand new author to author interview series in which some of today’s finest writers discuss the writing life, the craft of writing and their latest works. We’re thrilled to feature Micah Perks and Michelle Jones-Bailat in conversation.

Micah Perks: What languages do you translate?

Michelle Jones-Bailat: I translate from French into English, and I have done work from Japanese into English but I am much much much slower in that pair and have mostly stopped except for work from some former clients and friends.

Micah: Wow. You are so cool. I’m not particularly good at learning other languages, but I’m working on my Spanish. I spent the last year in Europe on sabbatical in Berlin and Madrid. How did you end up in Switzerland?

Michelle: It’s a typical story – met someone, we lived in the US for five years and then decided to try his country for five years. And now thirteen years later, I have even become Swiss.

Micah: What is your least favorite and most favorite thing about living in Switzerland?

Michelle: Landscape wise, Switzerland is ridiculously beautiful. I grew up in the Pacific Northwest – Seattle and Portland, OR – and I find that I feel much less homesick because there are mountains and water in my everyday view. I also love that Switzerland is home to so many different languages and I can drive an hour in one direction and hear Italian, and an hour in another and hear German – not to mention the wealth of languages brought into the country by the very large immigrant population. In my daughter’s class of 19 kids, only a minority are from monolingual families. I love this.

My least favorite thing is probably the smallness of the country. This has certain advantages, of course, but there is a geographical and psychological smallness that can sometimes feel claustrophobic. Perhaps this is the necessary response to a childhood lived in the vastness of the American west, it’s hard to know. The Swiss are careful, and the country is very safe – these are all good things. But the largest city, Zurich, has just under 400,000 people in it and the largest city near me, Lausanne, has only 140,000 people. I sometimes miss the bigness of larger places, both urban and wild.

Micah: I have lived for twenty-one years in the vastness of the American west.

 Michelle: Do you consider it home now?

 Micah: Yes and no. I love it here, but the landscape is not my home. My home landscape will always be the mountains, lakes and woods of the Adirondacks and New England. Geography plays a huge part in my writing. Setting, or world building, always comes first for me. It grounds me, pun intended.

Michelle: I love that you mention world building, because this is also part of how I approach fiction. Until that part works, I don’t often have a story.

Micah: Where is your novel set? What is your relationship to that setting?

Michelle: Unfurled is set mostly in Seattle, but parts of the story travel down to Oregon. I grew up in Seattle, and that landscape of mountains and water is a very important part of my inner geography – humans and the forest, humans and the ocean. I sometimes wish I had more interest in urban landscapes, but it’s yet to come.

Micah: I’m also a forest and water person. Your novel, Unfurled, sounds very dark and intense. Is it? Was it hard to write into that dark place for years? Or did it not feel like that at all?

Michelle: I suppose it is somewhat intense, and it would probably feel dark at times. I tried to offset some of that darkness with moments of quiet or moments of lightness, because I’m aware my subject matter isn’t necessarily easy. But the novel isn’t bleak, at least I don’t think it is! Whether it was hard to write into that dark place is hard for me to answer – the story in Unfurled (about Ella losing her mother at the age of ten, believing this woman was completely gone from her life, and then discovering later that this wasn’t at all what really happened) is one that I’ve been writing and re-writing for nearly fifteen years, so it clearly had a hold on me and it clearly wasn’t too uncomfortable to focus on.

Micah: That’s wild because I also worked on my last novel for fifteen years. And I’ve also been writing my short stories over a fifteen-year period as well. But I just linked them up in the last year.

Michelle: I have found that as process goes, I tend to write something and then spend many years re-writing it again and again. I can’t imagine writing a novel in a year. What about you? Have all your books taken many years? I’d also love to know which is your favorite story from True Love and Other Dreams of Miraculous Escape…

Micah: I’m also an obsessive re-writer. I love that part of the process. The other stuff I’ve written has taken a more normal amount of time. I think the fifteen-year period coincides with having young kids at home at the same time as I was a professor and a provost. I hope so, because I do not want to take fifteen years to finish my next book!

My favorite story is the first one, “King of Chains”, because it is about Houdini and Sarah Winchester, and I love them so much, and I loved doing research on them. I have a crush on Houdini.

Micah: What is your favorite part of Unfurled?

Michelle: That’s hard to answer, but my favorite part of working on the novel was researching about sailing and fishing. I grew up fishing but never in the ocean, that was new to me. And, I’ve been on sailboats but never learned how to sail myself. I spent a lot of time learning about ferries and other boats, as well as pouring over nautical vocabulary for inspiration.

Micah: We have so much in common! I feel like we’re the author equivalent of a successful OK Cupid date.

Michelle: Yes! It’s so fun to “meet” you this way! So how would you describe your latest story collection to a stranger?

Micah: The title is really on the nose. It really is about True Love and Other Dreams of Miraculous Escape. It’s about these people who all live in a beach town on the central coast of California, and about how in different ways they all long for connections, for love, but they also long for freedom, for escape from close relationships that sometimes feel stifling. There is also magic, dancing to Michael Jackson’s Thriller, and murder.

Michelle: Sold!

Micah: How about your elevator pitch? What’s Unfurled about?

Michelle: In the most basic way, Unfurled is about a woman who discovers when her father dies that the story she’s been telling herself about her life up to that point is all wrong. It’s also a mother-daughter story masquerading as a father-daughter story, and it’s about sense-making gone astray.

 Micah: I’m really excited to read it. In fact, I’ve ordered it. I love the way the title, Unfurled, seems to hint at both blossoming and coming undone. (Michelle: Thank you!) We’ve never met, but say instead of having this conversation on the internet, we could sit down and have coffee or a cocktail anywhere in the world, where would it be?

 Michelle: So many ways to answer this question! Since I’m excited about getting to know your work, I’d love for you to walk me through the California landscape that “grounds” your collection and then you choose the coffeeshop or bar. And then, I’ll take you for a beer on one of the islands where Ella and her father (main characters in Unfurled) stop when they go fishing in the Puget Sound.

Micah: I would love that, except for I hate beer. Do they have cocktails on those islands?

Michelle: Oops! Well, the San Juans were notable for smuggling between the US and Canada; I’m not sure about cocktails, but I bet we could find crates of hidden whiskey bottles and other spirits in many of the small harbors and deserted coves. Would that work?

Micah: That sounds so fun. And I love the San Juan islands. Perfect combination of sea, forest and lakes. I wish we had more lakes on the central coast.

Michelle: When you are not writing, what do you like to do?

Micah: Kayak, read, cook, hang out with my family, bike, binge Netflix series.

Michelle: Kayak! I have very happy memories of kayaking around Oregon lakes. What are you reading right now?

Micah: I’m reading a really disturbing book called Accounts Rendered. It’s a memoir by a woman who was in the Hitler Youth in the form of a letter to her Jewish best friend. I want to read your book, Unfurled, as soon as it’s out. What are you reading?

Michelle: Accounts Rendered sounds fascinating, but also, yes, very disturbing. I recently reread Frederick Reiken’s Day for Night, which is an unusual (and intricately structured) novel about the Shoah and its echoes through the generations. Have you read this? I’ve also just read your incredibly beautiful piece, “Enormous Wings” from the Kenyon Review – there is a mention of Houdini in this piece, so I’m wondering if it’s a part of your new collection?

Otherwise, I’m currently reading Geetanjali Singh’s The Empty Space. It’s a novel about a bomb that explodes in a university café somewhere in the world, and how the only survivor is a little boy. The city authorities give him to the parents of one of the students killed in the blast, and the novel follows his life as a replacement of sorts. It’s a stunning book.

Micah: I haven’t read either of those books, but they both sound powerful. My piece “Enormous Wings” is a personal essay, and True Love… is fiction, but my next book is a personal essay. Are you involved in the literary life in Switzerland? What is the literary world like in Switzerland? How does it compare to the U.S.?

Michelle: There is a small literary life in Switzerland and I try to keep involved. As a translator I read a lot from Swiss (Francophone) publishing, on the lookout for potential projects, and also because I love reading outside the US tradition. There are even a few English-language literary events in Switzerland each year – lots of international authors, for example – and that helps. I sometimes feel really off-centered from the US, literary culture-wise, but at the same time I think that’s probably a good thing. How about you – what do you like/dislike about California or Western American literary culture?

Micah: I think California is also off-center in ways I like and don’t like—we are not New York. But we’re also not Switzerland—we’re not particularly safe or careful. One thing that’s interesting about California literature is that we have had a lot of apocalyptic books coming out in the last few years—California by Edan Lepucki, Gold, Fame, Citrus, by Clare Vaye Watkins, Into the Forest by Jean Hegland, Black Wave by Michelle Tea, just to name a few. This can be partly explained by the apocalyptic political climate, but Octavia Butler and Kim Stanley Robinson and Ursula Le Guin have all written about apocalypse and utopia in California long before the Trump era. I think we in California have a conception of ourselves as both the end of the world and a land of endless new beginnings. There’s a vitality in that.

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Michelle Bailat-Jones is a writer and translator. Her début novel, Fog Island Mountains (Tantor 2014), won the inaugural Christopher Doheny Award from The Center for Fiction and Audible. Her second novel, Unfurled, is forthcoming from Ig Publishing, Oct 2018. Her fiction, poetry, translations, and criticism have appeared in various journals, including: The Kenyon Review, the Rumpus, Public Pool, the View from Here, Hayden’s Ferry Review, the Quarterly Conversation, PANK, Spolia Mag, Two Serious Ladies, Cerise Press and the Atticus Review. Her translation credits include two novels by celebrated Swiss modernist, Charles Ferdinand Ramuz: Beauty on Earth (Skomlin, 2013) and What if the Sun…? (Skomlin, 2016). Michelle was born in Japan, grew up in the Pacific Northwest of the United States and now lives in Switzerland. To learn more, please visit: https://michellebailatjones.com/

 

Micah Perks is the author of the upcoming book of linked short stories, True Love and Other Dreams of Miraculous Escape (coming in October from Outpost19) and the novel What Becomes Us (Outpost19; 9/16), winner of an Independent Publisher’s Book Award and named one of the Top Ten Books about the Apocalypse by The Guardian. Her memoir, Pagan Time, tells the story of her childhood in a log cabin on a commune in the Adirondack wilderness. She is also the author of We Are Gathered Here, a novel, and “Alone in the Woods,”  a long personal essay. Her short stories and essays have appeared in Epoch, Zyzzyva, Tin House, The Toast, OZY and The Rumpus, amongst many journals and anthologies. She has won an NEA, five Pushcart Prize nominations, and the New Guard Machigonne 2014 Fiction Prize. She received her BA and MFA from Cornell University and now lives with her family in Santa Cruz where she co-directs the creative writing program at UCSC. More info and work at: micahperks.com

Switzerland photo courtesy of: Rene Bohlen

Seattle photo courtesy of: Amanda Grove

California sunset photo courtesy of: Viviana Rishe