Contributor Spotlight: Zana Previti
An inclination I was never able to explain: if I
see a copy of a book I love on sale, I instinctively reach my hand out to take
it off the shelf and buy it, even if I own multiple copies of that selfsame
book at home. Today I almost bought two different editions of Cather’s The
Song of the Lark for five dollars each. I quelled the impulse, but only
because I am broke. If I had money, and lots of it, there's really no telling
how many copies of the book I would own. Poor as I am, I think I'm near the
vicinity of four or so. I keep tripping over copies of Love in the Time of
Cholera (one is in Spanish, a language I spoke briefly and brokenly in
college). I admit to owning seven different copies of Jane Eyre. I don't know how I have so many. They just accumulate. I
never get rid of them, of course. I love
them.
An inclination I was never able to explain:
breaking things up into small chunks and arranging them into a sequence without
any attempt at explicit transition. In the most recent HFR, #49, my short piece
“Sasha” appears as a series of paragraph-long vignettes (miniature portraits?)
of an imaginary physicist-cum-baby brother. Why
did you do it this way? I ask myself sometimes, looking dismally down at a
final draft. And probably, the answer is that I really, really love that white
space, and the possibilities it creates. What happened in between? One of the
best, most endearing love letters I have ever seen was scrawled, seriatim, on
all fifty-two of a deck of cards. It was brilliant.
An inclination I was never able to explain: writing love letters to people
I cannot know. Most of the stories I write – including “Sasha,”– end up,
despite my intentions otherwise, taking on the intimate tone and language of
love letters. Every day, there is some aspect of humanity that I fall in love
with (though not necessarily that I
respect or admire). I am in love with Ahab, and that he has bored little holes
into the deck of The Pequod so that
he can stand more securely. I am in love with the Great Grenouille, and his magnificent
scent of smell. And in the course of life, I stumble upon images and things and
moments that I fall terribly in love with: a gaggle of teenage girls studying
high school chemistry in a local library, arguing about significant figures. A
painfully alert German shepherd puppy, waiting for the woman he loves to buy
her coffee and come back, already.
Once, my father was driving his tractor in the field when he came across a deer
who refused to be frightened away. He drove back and away, again and again, and
each time he saw the deer, he raised his workgloved hand and said: “Hello.” I
am in love with this, whatever it is. I am deeply in love with the fact that
there are deep wide tunnels dug out under Wakahachie, Texas, waiting for the
particle accelerator that will never be built. (Hell, let’s be frank: I love
particle accelerators, period.) In my own writing, I suppose, and certainly in “Sasha,”
I want to write down and preserve those parts of the earth that I have found
extraordinary– either in possibility or in life – and create that sense of
wonder and obsession for others.
An
attempt at explanation: Perhaps all fiction is just that: the recounting of moments in which we
fall, minutely or hugely, in love with our characters. And through our
characters, ourselves, and what daily surrounds us.
*
Zana Previti is earning her MFA at the University of California, Irvine, where she is at work on her first novel. Her work has been featured most recently in Ghost Ocean Magazine and The Los Angeles Review, and is forthcoming from The New England Review. Find stories online in Ghost Ocean Magazine, Issue 7: and The Coachella Review, Spring 2011.
Zana Previti is earning her MFA at the University of California, Irvine, where she is at work on her first novel. Her work has been featured most recently in Ghost Ocean Magazine and The Los Angeles Review, and is forthcoming from The New England Review. Find stories online in Ghost Ocean Magazine, Issue 7: and The Coachella Review, Spring 2011.