An Interview with Amina Cain
Julia Merican | Tolka, Web Only, April 2024
Amina Cain’s writing articulates seemingly small, peripheral things that nonetheless hold us in their thrall with bewitching precision: the specific sadness of candlelight dancing across a solitary dinner table; how we catalogue our encounters with books that have moved us; the pleasure of going out to buy the persimmons and the butter, of sinking into a painting after a long day of labour, of meeting a friend after a spell of loneliness.
Cain is the author of the short-story collections, I Go to Some Hollow (2009) and Creature (2013), the novel Indelicacy (2020), and A Horse at Night: On Writing (2022), a series of essayistic enquiries. She spoke to me from Los Angeles in October 2023.
Julia Merican (JM): When I knew I was going to be speaking to you, I started to read the interviews you’d already had with other people. I wanted to get an idea of the things you had already been asked, to stretch this dialogical form by building on previous conversations. In an interview with Martin Riker, he said that in your writing, you have not just a voice but a sound, which I thought could be a lovely thread to begin with. Have you thought any more about the sound of your writing since?
Amina Cain (AC): Before he asked me that question, I think I was unaware of how important sound was to me. When I’m writing a draft of something, sometimes I’ll find myself whispering it, or chanting it unconsciously, probably to try out how it sounds. I always feel a little mystical talking this way, as if writing is something that happens to me, that I don’t enact, but I think that if I start doing that, it’s probably a good sign because it means that the sound is starting to carry me. Because it picks my voice up and takes it with it a little bit. When I’m writing, I do the thing that I think a lot of writers are told not to do, which is to edit as you go, to polish sentences as you’re writing. I almost have to do it, because that’s how the sound arises for me. If that voice isn’t coming through, then I can’t go forward as easily. Even though I do work within narrative, it’s not like I have a story that I’ve got to tell and that is the thing that carries me through: it’s more like the sound and the voice helps me to find the story, or to find the narrator’s preoccupations.
JM: When I read your writing, I often imagine the sound of fire crackling gently in another room, or a solitary dinner by candlelight: the quiet clatter of forks and spoons that somehow feels charged with dramatic intimacy. There’s a quietness that also weaves in very delicately with your preoccupations with pleasure and sensuality. Did you settle consciously on this spare, meditative sound?
AC: I think it’s something that just kind of happens. I’m one of those writers who doesn’t set out with strong intentions; I really do write to see what wants to arise. Some of the things that happen when I write come from very basic needs that I have as a person, and what the space of writing opens up for me. I’m someone who can get stressed out pretty easily, but I also love relaxation, so I move towards situations in my life and in my writing that are conducive to relaxation, and pleasure, and quiet, and I always hope that the reader likes these spaces too. It’s usually not that I want to create a certain kind of space; it’s more that I kind of need to be in that space. Writing is a kind of escape for me, which is why also often I’m writing an atmosphere that I’m either wanting to spend time in or curious about, or that I just want to enter somehow. Something about living in a domestic space – how I live in it – feels connected to this.
JM: I’m not sure if you’ve read Too Much and Not the Mood by Durga Chew-Bose? It’s this collection of essays –
AC: I haven’t yet! I need to read it.
JM: It’s beautiful. Chew-Bose has a very intimate relationship with space and observation that I discern in your work, too. She writes this one sentence about her concept of ‘nook people’: ‘Nook people are those of us who need solitude but also the sound of someone puttering in the next room.’
AC: I love that.
JM: Me too. I wanted to ask you: when you’re brewing a work, do you like life to be bustling around you, or do you have to be in absolute silence?
AC: We have a hillside behind our house that’s part of our property. It’s small, but for the last few years my husband has been terracing it, building these walls and fruit tree terraces, and he spends so much time out there. Living with someone who’s always sort of ‘working the land’ is affecting what it feels like for me to live here and my life. It’s part of my soundtrack; the hillside has definitely come into the novel I’m working on. I don’t listen to music as much as I used to, although I think that sometimes when I’m stuck, especially with fiction, listening to music can create an atmosphere, and sometimes I lean into that. What happens more than me listening to music while I write – because I do more often now write in silence – is listening to music that makes me want to write. I don’t know if you’ve listened to Bill Callahan or Smog at all? He definitely sends me into a writing space. That's a phrase I've started using a lot – a writing space – to describe how certain works of music, art and literature seem to work on me. I encounter them and feel inspired and it opens up a place for me to start writing.
JM: I like your idea of things that send you into a writing space. That’s something that comes across so much in A Horse at Night, when you’re writing a lot about being a reader and being someone who observes things very attentively. In Indelicacy as well, everything that comes to Vitoría is what she’s experiencing through other things. How do you record the things that move or enthuse you? Do you write in the margins of other books, as Vitoría does when she allows her friend to take her notebooks home with her: ‘I had already defaced it,’ she narrates, ‘and I was starting to feel as if I were having a conversation with it’?
AC: In a way, whatever book I’m working on actually becomes a sort of notebook. If something marks me in a certain way, it kind of goes straight into what I’m writing, like with this novel I’m working on right now. All the important things in life go in there for me; I’m someone who usually can’t work on two books at once. I never at this point write in the margins, because I’m so fastidious about books! When I have an experience, sometimes it sends me into a writing space and, sometimes, years pass before it enters into something I’m working on. I never know whether it will or not, and if it does, I think, Oh, here it is. I experienced this four years ago. Why is it coming into this novel?
JM: In the first essay of Known and Strange Things, Teju Cole wrote that whenever he tries out a new pen, he writes out the first few lines of Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf, about the Spear-Danes in days gone by. I love the ritual of it, that this was what he settled on. I was wondering: is there a sentence you hold close to you in this way, one that you think of when you’re trying on something new?
AC: I love that idea, and that book. When I’m reading or writing, I’m usually very focused on the sentence, but I don’t know if I have a favourite one. It’s more about what sticks with me. When I think about what is probably my favourite novel of all time, The Ravishing of Lol Stein by Marguerite Duras, I’m thinking more of the voice, the sound of the sentences and the atmosphere. I think those are the things that stick with me forever. When I’m reading books, I am struck by individual sentences, but in a way I think I’m struck by so many that I don’t know how to narrow it down to what the sentence would be.
JM: I mean, I can’t imagine – it’s so beautiful and random to me that that’s what he settled on.
AC: I know! I love it . . . I love it.
JM: How do you know when a sentence sounds right?
AC: Because of the rhythm of it. Not just how it exists on its own, but it is in relationship to the next one and the next one. But I want to almost say . . . because I like it? Because I like it and feel connected to it. That can’t entirely be a true answer, because sometimes I write sentences that I like, but that feel like fluff, that feel shallow. They’re not doing anything meaningful for what I’m trying to say, so I get rid of them. But still, I think if a sentence sounds right to me, part of it is aesthetic. It’s pleasing. I don’t think I’m a hedonist, and yet I feel I’m always chasing after things I enjoy in writing. The first sentence of Indelicacy, with its fields and its horses, felt like the right sound because it was a rhythm I had not gone into before. It felt like it created something, like there were sentences that would follow it. I’ve never been asked this, so it’s nice to think through it. I do feel like a sort of sculptor with sentences because I love chiselling and polishing. I love finding the exact right word. I’d say there’s a naturalness to it, but at the same time it’s not like every sentence just comes out easily, or that I say it exactly right the first time, which is why I’m editing as I go. So, there is this conscious process to find the right word, or the right image.
JM: I actually wrote this down as a note before our interview, that your sentences sometimes feel to me like sculptures, whittled away with perfect precision. You also write so much about reading in A Horse at Night, about feeling kinship with writers you both know and will never know: ‘They are dead, or they are alive, but still I won’t meet them. It is enough to read their work’. Would you consider reading to be a dialogical exercise, a conversation between two people?
AC: Definitely. Wolfgang Iser talks about reading as being an imaginative act, that there are two poles: the artistic and the aesthetic. The reader completes the book, in a way. It’s not like there’s one completion, because all readers see things differently based on what relationship they’ve had with an object and what it brings up for them, but I do believe that reading is a creative act. I definitely, definitely know that a big part of why I’m a writer is because I’ve loved certain books so much. I read them, and it’s almost like I can’t not write. But it’s not just about loving something. There are books I love that don’t send me into a writing space, but it’s still an interaction, just of a different kind.
JM: Do you also think of writing as a dialogue?
AC: It often is, but one that’s constantly changing: who or what I’m speaking with shifts depending on the particular scene I’m writing. It’s very clear to me who or what I’m in dialogue with. Then I move on to another day and another scene, and there’s something else I’m in dialogue with, and it can be a work of art or music, but it can also be between me and the experiences I have with my husband or a friend or an experience with a stranger that was weird. I almost feel there’s always a dialogue with something. I think I need the dialogue in order to write at all.
JM: Otherwise you’re just talking.
AC: Yes. The novel I’m writing now is more autobiographical than anything I’ve written before – I wouldn’t call it autofiction, and it’s not completely autobiographical at all – but I realise that I’m working through some experiences through it, and so there is this dialogue I’m probably having as a writer with . . . well, with a younger self. My younger self. Younger selves. It’s still in dialogue with someone in the past.
JM: Someone’s still speaking back.
AC: Yeah.
JM: If you could interview anybody, living or dead, who would it be?
AC: I almost want to say Marguerite Duras, but I don’t know if I would actually enjoy having a conversation with her. She’s probably my favourite writer, but there are books by her that I hate. When I read her non-fiction, she’s so brisk! I think I’d really enjoy having a conversation with Deborah Levy. And Teju Cole. Maybe I’ll just say two people who are living. From interviews I’ve watched with Deborah Levy – there’s something about her voice, but also the way she talks about things; she almost puts me in a trance. I would love to talk to her. And then also Teju Cole, since we’re talking about him already and he’s one of my favourite writers. I might be a little intimidated to speak with him – his level of intelligence!
JM: I think he’d be wonderful to speak with. He also makes these Spotify playlists that he’ll just drop every now and then, and they’re so carefully curated, it feels like he’s speaking directly to you. That’s something I found also in A Horse at Night: it’s so conversational, how it’s interspersed with all the things you’re reading and what’s around you. What do you think is your relationship between the written word and sound?
AC: For a while – I didn’t do it for very long, and it was only with a handful of books – but on my old website, one page was called If on a Winter’s Night a Reader, after Italo Calvino. I would record myself reading passages from different books. Obviously, there’s an interest for me there that connects to performance: I never did become an actor, but for a period of my life I was interested in that. So, I think it was a little bit of an outlet for performing writing, someone else’s writing. When I do my own readings, I am a quiet reader. I’m not very emotive. But I also feel when I’m reading aloud in public that I enjoy going into the sound of the words. It’s a way of entering the space of it.
JM: Do you think that there’s a particular resonance in having a story read aloud that is different to reading it on the page?
AC: There is something special about hearing someone read their own writing. The times when my books have been made into audiobooks, I’ll listen to an excerpt – I’ve never listened all the way through – and certain sentences are dramatised in a way I would never dramatise them. There was an event where actors were hired to read people’s writing, and the actor reading mine – it was just so hard to listen to! It felt like all the meaning was lost. I do think it’s important for writers to read their own work for that reason: just for readers to hear how the writer hears it themselves. I have a couple of friends who are really good readers of their work; they just read in a very particular way, and now when I read their work, I can’t not hear their voice. It’s nice.
JM: You’ve indulged me so much with this idea of sound in writing. I have just one more question: how would you describe the sounds of your writing?
AC: I don’t know if you’ve seen Chantal Akerman’s News from Home? There’s a particular way the voice reading her mother’s letters sounds: when it comes in, it’s like a continuous chant. I’m attracted to that continuousness, but something about that jaggedness in the sound of a sentence also means something to me. I often think about wanting my writing to cut through something, to be piercing. A sound that rings like a bell. Or the sound of a needle – so quiet you can barely hear it – going through cloth.
Amina Cain is the author of Indelicacy, Creature and I Go To Some Hollow. A Horse at Night: On Writing, came out in October of 2022 with Dorothy, a publishing project in the US and Daunt Books in the UK. She lives in Los Angeles where she is at work on a new novel that circles quietly around pleasure, landscape, heat, anxiety, endings, and love.
Julia Merican is a writer, editor, and creative practitioner from Kuala Lumpur. Her words have appeared in various print and digital publications, and once, quite excitingly, on an unfurling scroll in a gallery. She often finds herself thinking about transitory or ruined spaces, how heritage is made and broken, and the art of living so gently you barely make a sound.
