The Mimic’s Own Voice

Tom Williams’ novella, The Mimic’s Own Voice, was released in 2011. Williams was kind enough to entertain a few questions of mine in this email interview (conducted in early December 2011). Williams’ story is a quirky consideration of mimicry and biography. And I’m not just saying that because of the kind sentiment he expresses at the start of the interview. As noted in his bio: “A former James Michener Fellow, he has received individual artist fellowships from the Wisconsin Arts Board and the Arkansas Arts Council. He currently is an associate editor of American Book Review” and Department Chair/Professor of English at Morehead State University. My thanks to Williams for his time and thoughts as well as Susan Henderson for helping to arrange this interview.

Tom Williams: Tim, let me first say thanks for agreeing to do this interview. One of the great things about having a small press book is that I’ve been required, pretty much, to do a lot of my own publicity. Yet I get to meet (in this virtual way) people like yourself, who do so much for writers and, it seems to me, receive so little in return. I hope I don’t stumble too much over these great questions.

Tim O’Shea: In developing this story, how early did you realize it was best suited as a novella, as opposed to a novel or short story?

Williams: As evidence of my unerring commercial intuition, I knew almost right away that it was a novella. The opening lines had a certain kind of tone and were pointing toward an almost historic sweep. I thought for a time it might be a novel but sensed the appropriate length was short of novel length after I had gone through, for the first time, my comedy history–from the one liner royalty to the vernacular story tellers to the mimics to the social critics to, finally, the observational comics. To flesh it out too much would, I thought, ruin the joke, and to try to bring it in under 30 pages would leave too much out.

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