It is difficult to explain what makes Svetlana Alexievich’s work so moving. Hardly any of the words in the books that bear her name are her own. Hardly ever does she allow her authorial voice to make itself heard. Rather, in the literary equivalent of collage, Alexievich writes by arranging others’ words. At times, she seems to nudge her interlocutors, provoking them, asking them questions or contradicting them. But we only become aware of this behind the scenes maneuvering in her interviewees’ rare outbursts, which she faithfully records alongside their tics and mannerisms. Similarly, if we sometimes come to suspect that she must dictate the flow of the conversation, asking productively open-ended questions, her texts are silent about how or when she might do this, recording only the answers that are spoken back to her. Those whose lives she documents seem to come out of nowhere and to speak into the void.
Even among those literary fiction writers who publish successfully with the Big Five, few make a living solely from their books. Many get a significant share of income from events, so their workplace may often be made up of (repetitive, impassioned, and/or draining) conversations with bookstore audiences and students and festival attendees and organizers bringing them here and there. Many of us work in the academy, of course (as discussed in Mark McGurl’s influential 2009 book The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing), though adjunctification, austerity, and the hierarchical bad vibes of higher ed are undercutting that profession. Increasingly, many literary writers are turning to screenwriting. And many simply work other jobs, stealing time for writing on the side. So, books exist in the terms that publishing shapes, yes, but writing’s origins and activities are more diverse, diffuse, mysterious—both more constrained (since most of society supports literary work less than the publishing industry does, and that includes the academy) and more possible than publishing’s limits suggest, both freer and more precarious. It’s good to consider how fiction reflects its immediate economic conditions, but those conditions are about more than conglomeration in literary media.
Young envisioned a book that would top out at around two hundred pages and take two years to complete. When she delivered the manuscript to Scribner eighteen years later, the stack of papers was almost half as tall as she was. In the meantime, Young had acquired a new residence (the Greenwich Village apartment where she was to spend much of her life), a new editor (Burroughs Mitchell), a new series of honors (Guggenheim, Newberry Library, and Rockefeller Foundation fellowships), and a new title for her now epically proportioned novel: “Miss MacIntosh, My Darling.” Young, too, had reconstructed the Harmonist labyrinth—out of paper and ink instead of shrubbery and wood. In her version, though, there was no shrine waiting to be found in the center.
Not wanting to cause ecological problems by planting the trees across the Pacific Northwest, Stielstra would eventually contact one of the foremost experts on the coast redwood, a botanist and forest ecologist named Stephen Sillett, at Cal Poly Humboldt, and ask if moving redwoods north was safe. Sillett thought planting redwoods around Seattle was a fantastic idea. (“It’s not like it’s going to escape and become a nuisance species,” Sillett told me, before adding, “it just has so many benefits.”) Another factor encouraged Stielstra too: Millions of years ago, redwoods — or their close relatives — grew across the Pacific Northwest. By moving them, Stielstra reasoned, he was helping the magnificent trees regain lost territory.