#iris smyles

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iris smyles

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IRIS SMYLES

Bio: Iris Smyles is an American writer. Her debut novel Iris Has Free Time was published in 2013 by Soft Skull Press. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt published an informal companion novel to Iris Has Free Time in 2016 called, Dating Tips for the Unemployed, which is a semi-finalist for the 2017 Thurber Prize for American Humor.

http://www.irissmyles.com/

https://twitter.com/irissmyles

NOTE: This interview was originally conducted in the winter of 2017. Sorry for the delay.

What books or other creative projects are you working on now? How often do you focus on long-time projects versus short-term inspirations?

I am finishing a book of light verse and cartoons called "Single Life." It's a sort of Dorothy Parker meets Ogden Nash and Edward Lear type of thing. I am also half finished with a book of novelettes, which I am thinking to call "Iris Smyles' Novelettes, by Iris Smyles." Then, too, I am always writing essays, long and short, and have in mind to complete a book of them this year. And then, I have a new novel I have been making notes for and am researching, but I haven't started properly on it. I am trying to clear away these other projects first, in order that I devote myself exclusively to the novel. A novel, I find, requires a deeper level of engagement than short pieces. It requires, at least for me, living within a sustained dream. This is what is so wonderful about writing something long, but also, why I feel like I need to carve out a space for it. Once I start, really start, I don't want to have to commute to it.

Do you see your upcoming work changing stylistically from your previous work? I've written a lot more than I've published so far, and I write in many different voices, so the new books--especially the novelettes (which are sometimes surreal and mostly have no "Iris" character) and the poems--may seem a departure from my first two books which both have a first person "Iris" narrator. But there are glimpses of that surrealism or whatever you want to call it in both Iris Has free Time and Dating Tips for the Unemployed, most often seen in "Iris's" asides. The novelettes will turn the structure of my previous books inside out a bit. Iris's very fictional novelettes will make up the bulk of the book, and there will only be one story that features, "Iris," the character from my first two books and their author, who is also a character.

I read the graduate school scenes of IRIS HAS FREE TIME with great interest because it was very transparent to me the world that you were describing, as a fellow City College MFA writing grad (or were you a different concentration?). Now that you are several years removed from the MFA environment, what takeaways do you have from when you were there? I mainly found MFA to be a time to write and live very cheaply.  Do you keep in contact with any of your professors? Frederic Tuten is the greatest living fiction writer in America today. He is one of a very few writers left who write with scope and wisdom and far reaching imagination and music. Most contemporary fiction, with its smallness, its banality, its leaden prose and lack of originality, makes me want to put my eyes out and wander the desert. Most contemporary fiction makes a good case against reading, and so I regard most contemporary authors as the enemies of literature. But about CCNY--I met Frederic Tuten while a student at CCNY--I went there to study with him after having read his great Tintin in the New World, and he changed my life. He has been a great mentor, inspiration, and friend. I do not exaggerate by saying he changed my life. He believed in me and my work and by example helped me to believe in myself, at least enough that I could continue. Self doubt, self criticism, can be so strong as to snuff out any project before it's even halfway to complete. I think to be fine at anything an extremely self-critical nature is required--high standards!--but then, in order not to be defeated by self criticism, a great amount of counter-confidence is required, too. This is probably why artists tend toward monstrosity--they house a terrible combination of self loathing and delusions of grandeur. What do you do for your day-to-day "work" life? Do you like it? Do you like living in NYC?

New York City is more of an idea than a place. Every generation comes here to find something different. I moved to the city I saw in Ghostbusters and Hannah and her Sisters, which is gone, if it ever existed. Now they come for the city surrounding Carrie Bradshaw. And then all the generations before mine--what did Dorothy Parker come to find? And EB White? And Djuna Barnes and Herman Melville and Edgar Allen Poe? Once, my neighborhood was farmland. It's settlers came for the grazing, I guess. I do not like New York City today. But I am married to her, in sickness and in health, and I love her despite the way she chews at breakfast. New York City was my home before I ever lived there and even if I leave, it will still be my home. It's the only home I've ever known.

As for work, talking about money is historically considered impolite, I think, because it asks one to confess how one acquires it, which, if one is to answer truthfully, may lead one to confessions of criminality and/or moral bankruptcy; I do not want to tell you or anyone else what I've traded for a living. I'd sooner answer you my number of sexual partners, which, at least, I've come by honestly.

A lot of artists and writers have had calls to action or predictions that art/literature in America will change greatly in this new era after the recent election. Could you or do you see your own work changing? I guess all writing will change at least contextually, although all writing is also always changing contextually. I think it's important for an artist's work to stand outside of politics. Writing with a clear, localized agenda or message is propaganda (even if for a good cause, even if useful propaganda), but not art. In art, I admire work that engages politics by transcending it. I'd put Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain in that category, all of Kundera, Frederic Tuten's Talien, The Adventures of Mao on the Long March, and Tintin in the New World. As for my own work, we'll see.

[coverspy]

Dating Tips for the Unemployed, Iris Smyles (F, 30s, red scarf wrapped around shoulders, sighing audibly, 3 train)

[kurtbaumeister]

The Nervous Breakdown's Review Microbrew, Volume 3

The Nervous Breakdown’s Review Microbrew, Volume 3

By Kurt Baumeister for The Nervous Breakdown August 31, 2016 Fiction Reviews   Whether we’re talking about simple book reviews, hardcore literary criticism, or even the deathsport-cum-puffery that goes with writing workshops, it’s easy to make literary opinions about yourself rather than the work at hand. There are a lot of different ways this can happen in reviewing. Some of the more common: 1.…

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"It hit me: the real danger of the novel is that it might make you want to write one yourself." -from "Iris Has Free Time" aka the story of my postgrad life so far