W: What is it like to have support of booksellers for a debut novel?
TG: Oh I mean it changes your life, it truly does and I mean as someone who has depended upon
recommendations from booksellers my whole life I feel that my life has been permanently enriched by
the kind of careful curation of thoughtful booksellers, to receive that kind of support
from them was surreal to say the least. But it is the greatest vote of confidence I think.
W: Have you been engaged in a fairly lengthy tour of both the US and elsewhere
and met book sellers with the book?
TG: I have just, it was just five cities in the US but I was able to meet with several booksellers
and it was actually part of the industry that is most concealed to me. I went to an MFA program
and so you meet a lot of people in publishing and you meet a lot of other writers but I rarely met
any booksellers unless I happen to be friends with them. And so it was fascinating to hear this kind
of inside look at the industry and how and I guess one thing that was just a joy to learn was how
truly passionate and devoted each person I talked to was. It was very much a labor of love and it
seemed as though they were people who were really willing to champion work that was challenging,
unusual and, you know, was transforming, was transformative in some way or another.
W: The Rabbit Hutch is a very challenging novel, it's filled with some very complex
themes and ideas and a large cast of characters,
we get taken to lots of different locations. And after reading it I wondered where you had started.
TG: Well, I think it started with reading. I was reading The Quick and The Dead by Joy
Williams which is a polyphonic novel and then I very quickly read a bunch of other contemporary
polyphonic novels and I became increasingly enchanted by the form. I think that the form of a
polyphonic novel operates more like an ecosystem, where you're sort of trusting the reader to build
their own experience, to find the resonances and in the best poly fiction novels each life form,
no matter how seemingly insignificant or small is essential for the health of the whole.
And so the idea of... it also seemed to capture sort of a chaotic the, for me, the chaotic
nature of consciousness even within one person's mind and body. So I wanted to try out the form
and I also knew I kept being pulled to the post-industrial midwest which is where I was
born and raised and I realsed that polyphonic form is great for books whose primary character
is not a human being but rather a place, an idea, an object. And so I started writing
with the intention of making it a short story and it was Joan who came to me first. I had
listened to an interview with someone who screened obituary comments for a living on a website and I
thought what would that job do to your brain over time. And then she introduced me to the others.
W: The novel is filled with lots of I suppose what you might call darkness. There are people
who are living on the sort of fringes of society in a decaying community who have
had to deal with lots of difficult things. But it also has these moments of light,
I mean really bright light that suffuse the novel and I wondered whether you felt as a novel, sorry,
as a novelist, that it was essentially a dark or a light book or absolutely both of those things?
TG: I recently encountered a term from my undergraduate advisor Joyelle McSweeney,
who's also a writer and she says she's drawn to indivisible opposites. And I find that to be
very useful term. I think it's true for me too. I find comedy and tragedy to be inextricably bound
and I guess the. I mean the Shakespeare work that I'm most drawn to are his
tragi-comedies and I think comedy is just another nutrient in the soil and
it's not something that, it's not something that I can kind of intentionally program into the text
or I'm not adding jokes after I've written it. It just kind of reveals itself to you naturally
as you write. And so for me the darkness and the absurdity were, yeah, they were
tied together. And the comedy is sort of, I mean comedy is a classic coping mechanism for pain.
W: So I was really struck by a couple of quotes from a couple of the characters
which I wanted to talk about. One is from, is it Blandine or am I saying that incorrectly?
TG: I say Blandine but she gave her name to herself so there's no wrong answer.
W: She's talking about trying to find good things in the world and she says 'Why do vices get to be
physical? Why do they get to clutter up the world? Why can't I see any [ __ ] virtues? And I wondered
if you could tell us a bit more about that, that sort of idea that
there is, we can all see that what's wrong in the world, why can't we see more of what's right.
Tell me a bit about that as a theme.
TG: Well she she gets that from a Hildegard von Bingen play. Hildegard von Bingen was
a Benedictine abbess who was born in 1098 and she wrote a play in which all the virtues were merely
voices and the vices were physical actors. And so I think the implication of that play is that you
have to listen. Maybe it's not always visible but if you kind of build quiet into your life and you
start to tune yourself to those frequencies you can hear them. But I do think that especially now,
I mean that was written you know thousands of years ago, but now I find that
with the rise of the internet and social media, the way that news is now metabolised and processed
it is true that bad news is profitable. And it's, you know, there's an extreme incentive for media
to prioritise bad news over good news. And so maybe now more than ever it's important to
make a kind of internal shift and to take the work of seeing the light in the world
seriously. Frank O'Hara is one of my favourite poets and I find this
true for his writing as well. He really makes a point of standing in the light.
The poems may be addressing really painful things, very sad things, but through his humour,
through his language, through his sort of endless, I think, sympathy for everything around him,
including I think toward himself, there's this decision to stand in the light.
W: And Joan, the character that you mentioned earlier who sort of begun this novel for you,
she says 'I think we should all take each other a little more seriously.' And I thought
this was such an insightful thing to say and possibly the solution to the world's problems.
You show a really interesting array of characters and you treat them with seriousness as a writer.
Do you think the world would be the better place if we all took everybody a bit more seriously?
TG: I do. I mean I think this is in some ways not just the operating principle of my writing but
how I try to live as well. There's - I'm gonna quote another mystic from the Catholic church.
Simone Weil has this line that I encountered when I was 20 and I could not forget it. It's an essay
called Attention and Will and she says something like 'To know that this man who is hungry and
thirsty really exists as much as I do, that is enough, the rest will follow.' And I do think
that that's where pretty much every transformative act of compassion begins simply understanding that
every creature around you, every life form is as real as you and therefore their pain, their joy,
their longings are all as real as yours. And it becomes very difficult to be cruel to people that,
you know... I mean this is why each kind of genocide and world war has to begin with a
dehumanising campaign against the vilified group. Unless you start to treat... as long
as you see someone as human as real as you and even I think this applies to non-human animals,
if you can see them as real creatures whose pain is real it's very hard to mistreat someone.
W: We've mentioned Joan and Blandine, there are plenty more characters for
readers to get to know but as I say you do treat all of them as very important
individuals and I think that's one of the reasons why the book hits home so hard. So
Tess, thank you so much for talking to me briefly about it.
TG: Thank you for having me.