Birds of Paradise: A Novel

Article first published as Interview: Novelist Diana Abu-Jaber on Birds of Paradise: A Novel on Blogcritics.

If you are a regular listener to NPR, you likely have heard one of novelist Diana Abu-Jaber‘s frequent essays. Next week (September 6, to be exact) marks the release of the award-winning author’s newest novel, Birds of Paradise [Editor's note: Of course, the book is out as of this past Tuesday]. While I was already aware of Abu-Jaber, thanks to NPR, I did not realize she had finished her new book until an early July tweet by Bethanne Patrick (aka @thebookmaven). Soon after learning of the new novel, I reached out to Abu-Jaber for an email interview–and she was more than happy to entertain my queries. As described by her publisher (W. W. Norton & Company): “In the tropical paradise that is Miami, Avis and Brian Muir are still haunted by the disappearance of their ineffably beautiful daughter, Felice, who ran away when she was thirteen. Now, after five years of modeling tattoos, skateboarding, clubbing, and sleeping in a squat house or on the beach, Felice is about to turn eighteen. Her family—Avis, an exquisitely talented pastry chef; Brian, a corporate real estate attorney; and her brother, Stanley, the proprietor of Freshly Grown, a trendy food market—will each be forced to confront their anguish, loss, and sense of betrayal. Meanwhile, Felice must reckon with the guilty secret that drove her away, and must face her fear of losing her family and her sense of self forever.” In addition to the book, we also delve into her recent mention in a New York Times piece on email manners.

How early in the development of Birds of Paradise did you realize it had to be set in Miami–and what appealed to you in terms of setting it there?

Miami was present from the very first page. My husband and I moved to Miami eight years ago and I knew I wanted to use it as a setting. Ever since my second novel, Crescent, I’ve been very inspired by sunlight and water and I always like to use a strong setting for my stories– like the city of Syracuse and the blizzard that seems to keep blowing throughout Origin, my third novel. Birds of Paradise is a reflection of Miami’s many layers– its outward dazzling tropical colors and beauty, its racial and cultural collisions. I’m fascinated by that complexity and challenged by it. Setting my new novel here gave me a way to reflect on my adopted city and to push myself to learn more about it.

Structurally the story is broken down into chapters alternating their focus/perspective between varying characters–with the chapters labeled by character names. How challenging was it to structure the story in such a manner?

Actually, I found it easier to use the alternating perspectives than a single unified point of view because it gave me a way to break up the action and to tell the story from different vantage points. It did mean that I really had to become deeply familiar with each of those characters– more than, perhaps, with a novel governed by just one or two central characters. But I felt that this helped enrich the story, so that I couldn’t rely on “prop characters” to tell my story.

With the Muir family, was there any family member that you struggled to find the right voice for them in particular (or vice versa, any family member that was easier for you write and why)?

Brian, the father, was a real challenge for me, because he was of a species that I found very mysterious– the corporate executive. At first he was pretty ruthless and unsympathetic and the people who read my early drafts pointed out that they felt like I wasn’t being fair to him. Getting his character right became an important challenge for me– to push myself past my own preconceptions and to find his uniqueness and humanity.

One character, Brian, is a real estate lawyer–how much research did you undertake to get his work as accurate as possible?

As I mention in the earlier question, his profession was very new territory to me. Luckily, I have several good friends who are lawyers– they gave me lots of insights and more leads to other lawyers. I took many, many attorneys out to lunch, dinner, waylaid them in corridors, interviewed total strangers on the phone, through email, even on Facebook. I went to city commission meetings and zoning board meetings and talked to tons of developers. I also read books and articles about the lawyer’s experience, their training, their day to day struggles. It was a fascinating project because it was all so new, and the more I learned, the more interested I became.

This GoodReads review noted that “While not marketed to the YA [Young Adult] audience, this book will appeal to both adults and teens.”Are you hoping to garner some new YA readers with this new novel?

Wow, that’s interesting! It hadn’t crossed my mind that this might appeal to YA readers. There’s some heavy stuff in this book, so I’d hope they would be fairly mature teens.

How instrumental has Twitter and social media become in terms of drawing attention to your work?

That I really don’t know. My sense is that almost everyone on social media is advertising something, so at times there can be a bit of an echo chamber effect. But I enjoy the simple fun of meeting new people in this way– it’s especially nice for people who work from home and don’t get to carouse around much with a gang of co-workers.

I was fascinated to learn from this 2008 interview that you will write periodically during red lights, when did you first realize that you were capable of creativity while driving?

Ha! You know what, I started writing at red lights years ago when I worked as a film reviewer for the Oregonian newspaper. I found that my thoughts about a film were always clearest and freshest while I was driving home after the viewing, so I kept my pad out next to me in the car and eventually realized, hey! This actually isn’t a bad way to get thoughts down quickly….

Another non-novel related question. After your participation in this New York Times email manners story, did you start getting replies from emails you sent a long time ago?

That is too funny. I’ll tell you who I heard from — all sorts of people who thought they knew who the other writer was that I’d referred to in my story. All these people had had similar experiences with a friend who never followed up on their invitations, and they were CERTAIN they knew just who my story was about….only they’d all mentioned different names and none of them was the person I was talking about. Turns out, it’s just a really common experience!

When you write pieces like this one for NPR, do you ever find that you gain new readers of your novels, thanks to this exposure?

Wait! Isn’t that how I heard from you? All I can say with any authority is: I sure hope so. I’ve written commentary pieces for NPR and other media over the years and while there’s a big difference between an essay and a book, I’d like to think the short piece gives you a nice little window into what the larger works might hold.

Is there anything you’d like to discuss about Birds of Paradise that I neglected to ask you about?

Not really– just to tell people that Birds of Paradise is now available for pre-order from places like Indiebound.com and Amazon.com, that I’ll be traveling on a book tour this September and October, and they can learn more about me and my event schedule at my website www.DianaAbuJaber.com.

Slanted and Enchanted

In the introduction to her book, Slanted and Enchanted: The Evolution of Indie Culture, Kaya Oakes writes: “If we understand culture to mean something more than a style of music, a visual aesthetic, or a literary mode and try to define it from its Latin root, cultura—“to cultivate”— then we can see how indie artists have traditionally worked together to cultivate many things: credibility, freedom, the ability to promote their own work and to control how it’s promoted, self-reliance, open-mindedness, and the freedom to take creative risks. Likewise, if a culture is truly a group of people working and living together, independent artists have traditionally embraced the value of networking, making connections, and striving toward doing their art, their way. If being independent in your choices about what you listen to, look at, read, and watch implies a lack of compromise, then many of the people still making music and art independently would absolutely fit that definition. Indie’s ambiguity can partially be chalked up to its emphasis on making its participants feel individual and unique. But before any of us were able to be creatively independent, we had to build on the practice of our independent predecessors. Because indie’s history is in many ways a shadow history— one that parallels and reflects mainstream culture but also poises itself as being a subculture of outsiders— the threads connecting the twentieth- and twenty- first-century indie movements are not always readily apparent, especially in this day and age, wherein young artists face a plethora of choices about what kind of art they will make and how to distribute that art. Young fans often encounter art that builds on traditions of independence with which they may not be familiar.” (The entire intro can be read here at Oakes’ site). In the book, Oakes (who co-founded Kitchen Sink magazine) set out to examine the evolution of the indie movement and the scope of its impact. My thanks to Oakes for her time and insight into the DIY dynamics.

Tim O’Shea: In the preface, you concede that you “did not manage to interview a number of people” that you assumed astute readers may “have liked to hear from”. How did you go about deciding who to interview and who to not?

Kaya Oakes: Mostly it came down to two factors: availability and willingness. Interestingly, those are not the same thing. Lots of folks were willing but not available and vice versa. My initial approach was very typical of DIY: I just asked people I knew who they knew, working the network. After that it was a matter of sending out lots and lots of email queries, explaining what the book was trying to do. One of the first people I talked to was Ian MacKaye, who of course answered the phone at Dischord when I called. When I described the book to him, he initially said, “that’s a terrible idea! You can’t define indie!” At that moment I thought, oh shit, I am screwed. But after two hours on the phone, he got that I was trying to do more of a series of historical snapshots and we had a great conversation. Other people were happy to talk but scheduling didn’t work out. Others have left indie behind and have no desire to discuss it. In one case I discovered someone I wanted to talk to was already collaborating on a different book and there was a conflict of interest. And others were willing and available, and that’s who you see in the book.

O’Shea: In the comments section of a Cleveland Plain Dealer review of the book, you engaged in a respectful and enlightening dialogue with the critic. Coming out of that, you mentioned “One of my post book projects is compiling an indie city guide for the book’s website” How is that project going?

Oakes: Ah, abandoned. There wasn’t enough time available to make it appear in a timely fashion close to publication, but maybe I’ll pick it back up again, along with learning the banjo, how to knit, finishing several abandoned poetry manuscripts, cleaning the bathroom, and various other things I don’t have time for at the moment.

O’Shea: In analyzing the evolution of the indie culture can you point out certain breakthrough moments in your research that became some of the lynchpins of your final analysis?

Oakes: A big “aha” moment came talking to Peter Berg of the Diggers. When he described some of their methods of communicating and putting on happenings, something clicked. He talked about putting out live news sheets while Digger events were going on, using the printing press the Diggers owned, and I thought, hey, that’s just what zines were doing, and what we do now with the internet. I’d always known we took from the 60s counterculture in the 80s, but I hadn’t previously thought about how closely the two cultures mirror one another since punks had such a bad relationship with hippies here in the Bay Area. Secretly, I think many punks admired the hippies, but the problem for many people in my generation was that the hippies were our parents.

O’Shea: You toured to support the book, in fact your plans were “This tour is happening DIY style: I’m flying to Seattle on donated frequent flyer miles, no media escorts are involved (Google maps and public transit will suffice), I’m crashing with family and friends, and I’m hoping to make it on a budget of about $20 a day. If I can manage that, my reward will be spending lots of money at the stores where I’m reading.” How did the tour go?

Oakes: Good and bad, like any book tour. In San Francisco I got something like 5 people, the next night in Berkeley more like seventy, the next night in Seattle five again (that was the night Michael Jackson died, which made me worry about being cursed), then at Powell’s in Portland a big turnout again. Since the summer jaunt I’ve also gone to LA and did a great event at Skylight Books with a panel of indie people, and the final event was just this past week in Berkeley, another panel. The panels turned out to be a great idea because it’s not just me reading from a book; it helps other people showcase projects they’re working on and encourages audience involvement. Oh, and I did buy a lot of books.

O’Shea: In the acknowledgments, you thank your agent, Michelle Brower, describing her as the “first person to take this project seriously”. How long had you been contemplating the book before she threw her support behind it–had you faced a great deal of pushback to the idea before then?

Oakes: Michelle actually sparked the idea for the book. I’d written an essay for the magazine I co-founded and edited, Kitchen Sink, about the underground music course I teach at UC Berkeley. Somehow Michelle got her hands on this small circulation magazine and asked me if I wanted to develop a book proposal around the article. So I consider myself absurdly lucky; she has had my back the entire way.

O’Shea: I love the conflicted tone of your writing (scholarly while irreverent)–case in point on page 74: “In 1987, Livermore took an interest in another local band. Green Day was less politically engaged that Op Ivy, but had a tremendous advantage over many other bands: its music was catchy as fuck.” How enjoyable is it for you to take tonal shifts in your analysis while writing?

Oakes: The shift between more scholarly prose and vernacular really mirrors the way I speak. While I do teach writing to university students, I am not a traditional scholar in the sense that I don’t primarily write for scholarly journals, nor do I hold a PhD (I do have an MFA). Although I speak at academic conferences, sit on committees, judge literary prizes and do other typically academic things, I also come from a zine writing background and a small press, alt weekly, indie magazine background where the informal style is more typical. My writing has always gone back and forth tonally, which drives some people nuts, but the way I speak drives some people nuts too. It’s a love it or hate it kind of thing, I’m afraid.

O’Shea: Speaking of Livermore, that seems like the case of where success ruins a business. Is that a fairly common trend in DIY circles?

Oakes: Yes and no. Merge is doing great even after Arcade Fire and Spoon blew up, but they’re a rarity. In Lookout’s case there are many reasons why it didn’t work out. Larry gave me some of the story, but if people are interested in hearing more, I’ve been reading Gimme Something Better, the new oral history of Bay Area punk, and that details the demise of Lookout from multiple points of view, including the bands they worked with. It’s a sad story but ultimately other indie labels seem to have learned from it.

O’Shea: Have you heard from Pavement fans who picked up the book because of the familiar title, but ended up enjoying the book even though it may have not been what they expected?

Oakes: Only on sites like Goodreads where people like to rank books based on things like titles and paper quality without actually reading them. The original subtitle, by the way, was the Evolution of Independent Culture, but “indie” seemed more marketable to certain parties so we changed it. The word indie has gotten me into more misunderstandings and confusion than the Pavement reference. It’s a polarizing term for sure.

O’Shea: When you originally set out to write this book, which did you want to do more: entertain or inform the reader (or a mixture of both)?

Oakes: Both. I’m a big, dorky person in real life, but I also know my shit, and ultimately I’d like both of those things to come across. The biggest pleasure has been reading and getting comments from people who say this book made them want to start a zine, make music, make art. I wanted to honor the people who created the subculture but hopefully to inspire or at least nudge others to keep it going.

O’Shea: In a down economy like this one, what part of indie culture benefits the most and the least?

Oakes: Based on what I’ve seen and heard lately, the really small scale stuff is doing fine, whereas medium to big indie projects are suffering just like independent businesses are suffering. It’s similar to the one or two person small press publisher versus the indie press that tries to do multiple books a year. The multiple book press is suffering because they have to spend more but take in less. I think micropresses, people having shows in their living rooms, mini comics, web zines, crafting… those kinds of things are hugely appealing right now because start up costs are minimal.