Karen Russell once described her work as “Hitchcock meets the swamp.” Her début novel, “Swamplandia!,” certainly fits the bill. The novel grew out…
_You once said in an interview with The New Yorker that you are “a sucker for humor and strangeness.” These qualities are abundantly present in “Swamplandia!” Do you seek strangeness, or are you just good at recognizing it when it comes along?Well, I live in New York now and I grew up in Miami, so I've always had a pretty short commute to strangeness.
_The setting of “Swamplandia!” is the Florida Everglades. Do you feel influenced by other Southern writers? If so, by whom?Absolutely. Flannery O'Connor, Carson McCullers. Joy Williams who writes so beautifully and ferociously about the Florida Keys and the "Neverglades," as she calls them in "Ill Nature." I also love Floridian homeboys Carl Hiassen and Dave Barry. Wallace Stevens and his "Idea of Order at Key West.
It was especially important to me that Ava get to tell her story in her own language. In the same way that I wanted to capture the physical landscape of the swamp in this book, I really wanted to channel Ava's emotional state onto the page, this mixture of wariness and belief, innocence and complicity; the distorting affect that her grief over her mom's death has on her vision. All the wonder and terror of her crossing over.
_There are echoes of many of the stories in “St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves” in “Swamplandia!”—the most obvious being "Ava Wrestles the Alligator.
Ava Bigtree, the novel's protagonist, is a far braver kid that I could ever dream of being. Her emotional world draws on my memories of that age, but she's tougher and weirder than I was. I'd say the only one-hundred-per-cent-autobiographical part of this novel is the fierce love that Ava feels for her mother, Hilola Bigtree, and the love that exists inside the micro-society of the Bigtree family. That, and Kiwi's humiliating mispronunciations of words. That's all me, sadly.
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