Causality, madness, and death with Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi
Interview w/ Azareen Van Der Vliet Oloomi
Photo Credit: Beowulf Sheehan
Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi is the author of the novel CALL ME ZEBRA (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018) which won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. She received a 2015 Whiting Writers' Award and was a National Book Foundation "5 Under 35" honoree for her debut novel, FRA KEELER (Dorothy, a publishing project, 2012). Her work has been supported by a Fulbright Fellowship, a MacDowell Fellowship and a Fellowship from Art OMI and has appeared in The ParisReview, GRANTA, Guernica, BOMB, and the Los Angeles Review of Books among other places. Her novel AREZU is forthcoming from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in 2021. She is Iranian-American and has lived in Catalonia, Italy, Iran and the United Arab Emirates. She currently lives in Chicago.
Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi’s debut novel, Fra Keeler (Dorothy, A Publishing Project, 2012), is about a man who purchases a house and begins to investigate the death of the previous owner, the eponymous Fra Keeler. However, the investigation is less about a death and more about death itself, along with other questions of human experience as disturbing as they are commonplace. For me, reading Fra Keeler is like entering the mind—my mind—for the first time. This dark, obsessive book reveals and interrogates the many, often strange assumptions one must make to go on living for a day. And for the narrator of Fra Keeler, this interrogation leads to dangerous places.
It was my privilege to have a conversation with Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi about Fra Keeler, her writing process, and her teaching experiences.
James Ashby, Interview Coordinator
JA: Fra Keeler is a troubling novel, but it is also quite humorous, especially when the narrator gets fixated on something as simple as a dirty skylight or a slice of bread: “Because bread—I thought, coming back to my moment of repose—an honest slice of bread and a walk in the canyon must be among the greatest of morning rituals!” What motivated you to bring these moments of humor into a story concerned with questions of causality, madness, and death?
AVDVO: I don’t think those things are at odds with one another. In fact, there is a long tradition of literature that explores questions of death and causality by employing stream-of-consciousness and humor. In Fra Keeler, the humor puts into relief the narrator’s powerlessness and irrelevance. The narrator struggles against that irrelevance throughout the novel. In a way, his laughter is an acknowledgement of the absurd theater of life; it springs from the notion of having to go on despite not knowing if one can, or how one should go about the business of living. I’m thinking of Beckett’s lines: “You must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.” I suppose I find our smallness—when measured against the immensity of what we are asked to endure—to be incredibly, tragically comic.
JA: After his walk, the narrator says, “After all, the canyon had helped me to gain perspective. I had seen a bird, a stream, a sparrow, slept leaning against a rock listening to the sound of trickling water. What more could a person want?” Of course, this sense of perspective is short-lived for him. But how would you characterize your own relationship with nature? Or the relationship between nature and language?
AVDVO: I think of myself as being both of and apart from nature. I am completely intimidated by it; I’m in awe of how reactive and resourceful the environment is. It’s a tightly woven fabric—shift one thing and all the other parts will eventually register the change. Language functions in the same way. It’s alive, has an ecology, and is both resilient and accommodating to change. In other words, we are deeply entangled with nature: it acts on us and we act on it. This tension becomes palpable halfway through Fra Keeler, when the narrator goes on a long walk through a canyon. The walk represents a climactic moment in his thinking process—it pushes the atmospheric disturbance, which has been building up, over the edge. The canyon is not just the setting that frames the scene; it causes the final chain of events to unfold; what comes after it is brutal, savage.
JA: In your interview with Hoc Tok, you said that you wrote Fra Keeler with your “eyes closed in six-minute spurts over the course of a year.” What does your writing process look like for your current projects? Does your process have certain advantages/disadvantages?
AVDVO: I’m not sure what you mean by advantages/disadvantages. I tend not to measure my process in those terms. In my experience, the novel imposes the process—not the other way around. You, as the writer, have to yield to it. Some novels require more time, or more layers of excavation, and there really isn’t a way of speeding things along without shutting down certain key aspects.
The project I am currently working on happens to be much longer than Fra Keeler and, in some ways, it’s more complex. Over the last few years, I have accumulated post-its, index cards, notebooks, and wall-sized posters full of notes. I also have several versions of each chapter and, as the novel progresses, I go over these meticulously to see what needs to be brought back and what needs to be discarded. But none of this guarantees results beyond the organizational and pragmatic. For me, the most important thing is to sit in front of the page long enough to enter the web of the novel and lose track of time and space, the way I did when I was writing with my eyes closed. That sense of bewilderment and drift, of disappearing into the writing, is what keeps me returning to my writing desk day after day.
JA: Do you consider Fra Keeler or your other creative work to be political on some level? What do you think of the notion that all writing is political, or at least should be political?
AVDVO: I think language is political. It has the power to construct and deconstruct, to create and annihilate. That being said, I think the minute you impose absolutes on writing, it stops giving back—it withers away, becomes purely cerebral. I am interested in writing that is complex, honest, layered; the kind of literature that traverses multiple dimensions of feeling and thought and is capable of containing the complexity of what it means to be a person in the world.
JA: You teach in the M.F.A. program for creative writing at Notre Dame. How has your experiences with writing impacted your approach to teaching, and vice versa?
AVDVO: Teaching in an M.F.A. program allows me to inhabit writing at all times and to share it with a community of colleagues and students who are devoted to writing as a practice. I’m immersed in a constant conversation about literature. In fact, two years ago, I taught a seminar for M.F.A. students called Introspection and Voyage: Examining Narrative Across Time. We read The Divine Comedy, Don Quixote, and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea alongside works by Kathy Acker, Jorge Luis Borges, Ana Kavan, Lynne Tillman, Sei Shōnagon, and others. I designed the course with the intention to explore “the genealogy of radical literature.” We read texts that range from the medieval to the contemporary and that engage with literary traditions from around the world. It was a fantastic and rigorous class, and one I look forward to teaching again in the coming years.
James Ashby is a writer living in Colorado. He holds an MFA from the University of Colorado-Boulder.
Issue 6.2