Forgery by Sabina Murray + Author Interview [in Bloomsbury Review]
Ruffling Feathers: An Interview with Novelist Sabina Murray
Sabina Murray’s published output over the past five years has been substantial by anyone’s standards: three books, five screenplays, umpteen short stories, and winning the prestigious 2003 PEN/Faulkner Award. [Click here to see earlier article in The Bloomsbury Review, January/February 2004.] All that on top of teaching graduate students how to write well (including directing some eight theses every year, although this year it was 12), balanced with raising two small kids with her poet husband, John Hennessy (who just debuted with his collection Bridge and Tunnel, from Turning Point Books).
Murray swears she doesn’t get writer’s block. She’s got time management down so well that she can work minor miracles in scattered 20-minute snippets during her day. “There’s no other choice,” she says matter-of-factly. “You just keep going and you get things done. I’m not a procrastinator. I pack everything in.”
That is, until you get Murray to Greece and suddenly everything changes. Absolutely nothing gets done. Something just shuts off, she confesses, and she’s able to achieve an enviable state of do-nothingness. She’s been there six times already. “Mostly, I wade into that shimmering blue water, about knee high. My jaw goes slack. I think about nothing. As my body is digesting the too-big lunch I ate with the two glasses of wine I downed, I wait for the fishes to jump and just watch the horizon,” she laughs.
In this blissful state, Murray somehow managed to formulate her latest book, an enticing, slyly entertaining novel called Forgery. Rupert Brigg, an overprivileged New Yorker who knows a little something about art, mourns silently. As an antidote to his sadness, his uncle William insists he go to Greece to find more treasures that will further enhance William’s art collection. It’s the summer of 1963; the islands are gorgeous, the wine flowing, the water warm and beckoning. Lost and searching souls gather, hoping someone else will be interested enough to share their secrets and offer a few new ones in trade. …[click here for more]
Author interview: The Bloomsbury Review, September/October 2007
Tidbit: The inventive Sabina Murray, together with the wonderful Jessica Hagedorn and Helen Zia, was a guest for the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Program‘s “Contemporary Asian American Writers” public program on September 29, 2004.
Readers: Adult
Published: 2007
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