Joyce Carol Oates talks crime writing, character, and twitter with author Thomas Pluck (and also cats)

Joyce Carol Oates brings Thomas Pluck joy. This is their interview on CrimeReads… Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!

Thomas Pluck: I first met the author at a book signing. We had traded tweets about our pets beforehand, and she’d given me a story for my Anthony-finalist anthology Protectors 2: Heroes. But when she saw me, she leaned over to her friend the artist and author Jonathan Santlofer and exclaimed, “have you met Thomas? He’s a lovely kitty man.”

I am a large and hirsute man, a “temperate yeti,” in the parlance of a witty friend, and the “kitty man” nickname brought a few laughs. I have since embraced it; as a big goon with a nose smashed flat from fight training, it’s been a good icebreaker at readings.

We’ve been friends ever since, and Joyce Carol was gracious enough to submit to this interview for CrimeReads. As one of the most eminent American authors she should need no introduction. I won’t attempt to condense her impressive body of work or stun you with a roll of titles, but here are a few highlights of her accomplished writing life:

As one of the most daring writers working (in my opinion), she began writing regularly when she was fourteen, and was gifted a manual typewriter; she won a Scholastic award in her teens, the National Book Award for her novel them at age 32, and was given the National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama in 2010. With her husband Ray Smith, she published The Ontario Review literary journal until his death in 2008. She writes in many genres including Gothic and crime; if any would doubt she is a crime writer at heart, one of her formative literary moments was after reading the horse-whipping scene in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, which defined her duty as a writer: “Uplifting endings and resolutely cheery world views are appropriate to television commercials but insulting elsewhere. It is not only wicked to pretend otherwise, it is futile. If all a serious writer can hope to do is bear witness to such suffering, and to the experience of those lacking the means or the ability to express themselves, then he or she must bear witness, and not apologize for failing to entertain, or for “making nothing happen”—in Auden’s derisory phrase.” (This is from Celestial Timepiece, a web archive of her work run by Randy Souther, a great resource for all things JCO.)

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