This fictional Paris Review Interview with “Constance Eakins” is a clever bit of promotion for The Mayor’s Tongue. Here’s a pdf of the interview [1.5mb]. Eakins started with comics:
Interviewer: Was it when you ran away from home that you began to feel that you were going to be a writer?
Eakins: No, I always wanted to be a writer, even before I was born. My first story was what I like to call an image-story. When I hadn’t yet learned how to speak, my dear mother would give me a parcel of rusty nails, which I used to draw abstract shapes on the walls of our home.
I: How do you know that these were stories? I mean, doesn’t every child make drawings if given some sort of writing implement?
E: They were image-stories and if you went to look at them now they would make you weep from the beauty of their narrative swoop.
The classic nuts and bolts…
I: When do you begin writing each day? As soon as you wake up?
E: Yes, when I wake up in the morning I always have the desire to sit down to write. The first thing I do is write down my dreams, then I get to my fiction, poetry, theater, film scripts, monographs, critical essays, and journalism—in that order. But then I constantly am receiving telephone calls, gawking fans come up to my house, friends try to visit, and I am all the time interrupted. Somehow I manage to keep on writing.
[via maud newton]
Mark Larson 