Interview

Ravenhill Press

is proud to announce the publication of

The Daughter of the Doctor
and the Saint

a novel by
Edward Swift

Publication Date: May 1, 2011

Kelley Vandiver, whose painting appears on the cover of the novel, interviewed Edward Swift at his home in Mexico.

Kelley Vandiver: The Daughter of the Doctor and the Saint is your 8th book and the only one with a Latin American setting. How did you come to write it?

Edward Swift: My late cousin, Dana Pullen, and I traveled extensively in Mexico, and once long ago when we were spending the summer in San Miguel de Allende she told me about a Mexican woman who, at the age of sixteen, witnessed the assassination of her father. She fired her pistol at the assassin and shot off his ear. She put the ear in a jar and said: “Now I will hunt you down.” And she did. In fact she wiped out an entire family. She also ran a very classy brothel. That was about all Dana told me. The rest, and there is a lot more to the novel than what I have just told you, is made up. I added the old Indian weaver who sits in a dark room and records the present, past and future in the language of the treads. Writing in the language of the threads gave me poetic freedom as well as a second narrative.

KV: What would you say is the theme of the book?

ES: Love, poetry, and revenge. And although the main character, Josefina Esperon, is a murderer, I hope the reader will have as much sympathy for her as I do. It is possible that she may be caught in a web woven by the Gods and, like Phèdre, she is neither completely guilty nor completely innocent. I refer to Racine’s Phèdre several times in the book. It is the key to understanding Josefina. It is possible to say that the old weaver wove Josefina’s destiny in the on-going tapestry. Perhaps Josefina, like Phèdre, had no choice. Perhaps she was too influenced by the weaver of the tapestry. Perhaps she is downright evil, or too vindictive for her own good. I let the reader decide these things, but as for me, I have great sympathy for Josefina.

KV: Why don’t you name the country?

ES: Oh, I don’t know, I just didn’t feel comfortable calling the country Mexico. It isn’t Mexico, really, but it could be. The story takes place in the capitol of the smallest country in Latin America. At some point I say, the city is the oldest port in the Americas. That, as we know, is Veracruz. I felt more freedom of imagination by not naming the country.

KV: Do you consider your style magical realism?

ES: Not I do not. There are no flying carpets in my books. No one is blown away with the bed sheets like Remedios the Beauty. I write with a heightened and poetic realism. I borrow that term from Tennessee Williams. My literary life has been deeply influenced by Marguerite Young. She was my teacher at the New School for Social Research. I was in her class almost 4 years and continued studying with her informally after I left the class.

KV: Her writing class is legendary. What was it like?

ES: The most inspiring course of study on which I have ever embarked. First of all I chose to study with her because I loved Miss MacIntosh My Darling. Loved it! Could not get enough of it! And I still love it and read it for inspiration. Marguerite used to say the same things over and over. She said: “We are always crossing a bridge that might not reach to the other side but we go on crossing it anyway.” That line stays with me as a very good example of the life of the novelist or any artist, really. We are always crossing that bridge. Just plunging forward through the dark on blind faith while listening to an inner voice that urges us on. Most people silence that voice. Most people are afraid of it. If you are an artist, you have no fear. You just keep marching and hoping that you’ll make it to the other side. I wrote an article about Marguerite’s class. It’s called “Come in Mr. Proust: a Remembrance of Marguerite Young.” It was published in Gulf Coast, a literary journal from the University of Houston. The volume is XIII, Winter 2001, and you can order it on-line.

KV: You were born in the Big Thicket National Preserve of Southeast Texas. You lived in NY off and on for forty years, and now you live in Mexico. Why Mexico?

ES: I am a visual artist as well as a novelist, and I have never had to explain my art to Mexicans. They get it. In the United States my visual art is appreciated but not always to the degree that it is in Mexico. The Mexicans understand my mixture of the ridiculous and the serious. My involvement with death does not disturb them. Here death is viewed as part of life. Also, I’ve always had an affinity with this country. It is very modern, very ancient, and very exotic. Mexico inspires me. It makes me sick when newscasters all over the world report on nothing but the violence in Mexico. There’s violence everywhere. Plenty of it. There are many wonderful things about my adopted country. I love it. I particularly love the indigenous people, and the sense of cultural pride. Almost every city and town has a museum or a Casa de la Cultura. Art is more important here. Poets are revered throughout Latin American in a way that they are not revered north of the border. Every morning in my studio I turn on the University of Guanajuato radio station and listen to classical music and Mexican actors reading poetry. I love hearing my favorite poets read in Spanish, particularly William Butler Yeats. I think his poems must be beautiful in any language.

KV: What will you publish next?

ES: Walking on Glory is my next publishing venture. It is a psychological novel about a very close but strained friendship. It is also about the suicide of a friend of mine. The book is screamingly funny, and at the heart of it, so tragic it is almost impossible to laugh. I also plan to reissue my 7 published books. Some of them are deeply flawed and I want to revise them slightly. Correction: I want to revise Principia Martindale a lot. It is a mess, but even still, I love that book. It is important, I think, to face our messes. We can learn from them.
 
KV: You have been published by Viking, Penguin, Harper and Row, Doubleday and several literary publishers. You have received reviews that most writers would kill to receive, so why have you decided to self-publish?

ES: Very simply, commercial publishers and even small literary houses are no longer interested in the kind of books I write. I take chances with language and structure. My style is poetic and at times incantatory. My characters are larger than life. The marketing people I am acquainted with just hate this sort of thing, and in most publishing houses marketing people are as important, if not more so, than the editors. After all, someone has to sell the books. So at some point I had to decide what was best for my unpublished novels. I created Ravenhill Press, my very own company. It is named for Brother Horatio Ravenhill, one of my finest creations, who appears in my novel Principia Martindale. Publishing myself has certainly given me a lot of sympathy for all the problems that editors, book designers, and marketing people face. It is not an easy process, and the industry is changing so fast that no one really knows which way to turn anymore. I just hope that books are never obsolete. I love the smell of a book, the feel of a book. Every night I go to bed with a book. Books make me very happy.

Ravenhill Press
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Laredo, Texas 78043 edwardswift43@gmail.com

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Author Photos available on Facebook: Edward Swift Ravenhill Press
Calle de las Golondrinas 10
Colonia: Montes de Loreto
San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato
Mexico 37701