Interview

Kelly Cogswell on her book Odysseys

We talk with Kelly Cogswell, prize-winning journalist, veteran lesbian activist, and author of Eating Fire: My Life as a Lesbian Avenger whose new work, Les Odyssées de Fally Dogswell has just appeared with our press, Tetrapod. English coming soon.

First of all, what possessed you to write in French?

Ha! That’s kind of it, actually. I was possessed by all these words in French. I should have had an exorcism instead of scribbling in my notebooks.

You have to understand that I barely knew the language when I started writing. I picked it up living in Paris on and off. I’d write out little dialogues for myself before I went to the store but the butchers never stuck to their lines. Or I’d go to the library, check out a mystery, or a book on wine or cheese, and make my way through it line by line with a dictionary.

But much of that was passive, received language. Generating it, writing it, is different.

I think it came from the same impulse I had when I was a kid and I’d write in Spanish in my notebooks when I wasn’t even fluent. Which I think was the point. The desire to speak but also remain silent. To hide meaning even from yourself.

I’m curious. Given all that, I found the book really readable. Does it stick pretty close to the original text?

In some places. In others, the original was more a jumping off point. I revised the text with an editor who was also a translator. The goal was to figure out how to make it more standard French, but without totally losing the sense that it was written by a foreigner. I didn’t want the written equivalent of accent correction.

I sometimes wish I’d left it more raw but it was a choice between arty effects and communication, and this time I went for communication. It helped when I added the illustrations which are really rough, and often have a snarky dialogue with the text.

Let’s talk about those illustrations. I didn’t know you could draw.

Can I? It’s kind of like writing in French. Working in a language I don’t really know but still managed to express something. Amuse myself. Even if they are mostly slightly refined, sometimes deranged, doodles. With a few borrowings. And quotes. In the text, too, for that matter.

Like what?

Just look.

That hardly seems fair. How about a hint?

Nope. That’s the fun. Especially the stuff in the text. A lot of French people especially will get the echoes but probably dismiss them because why would this foreigner be quoting Camus or Cendrars or Hugo? Ditto for the drawings.

Especially when one of the responses to the first draft from native French speakers was to encourage me to never, never again write in French. You’re such a good writer in English. Why do you need French?

You didn’t get discouraged?

Sure. At first. But the fact is, nobody ever asks writers to write. Unless maybe they’ve got a contract and a deadline. Besides I’m pretty sure I have one of those disorders where if someone tells you not to do something you immediately have to figure out how to do it.

Oppositional Defiant Disorder.

Yeah, that. More seriously, there’s something really quintessential about writing (and drawing) something about the experience of exile in languages that are foreign. That you haven’t mastered. It’s the story of my life. God, I hope I didn't embarrass myself. Shit, I probably embarrassed myself. Whatever.

I was interested that, besides thinking of the immigrant experience, you saw, what should we call it? Queerness? As a kind of exile.

Not queerness, ugh. That word queer doesn’t mean anything since it entered the world of the academy, and even hets started identifying as it, planting their flag there. Probably to absolve themselves from being straight. No, I was thinking specifically about the state of being of a lesbian. A homo female. In which identity is irrelevant compared to that fact that you’re turned (oriented) one way while everybody else is going another. How homo sexual desire makes you a permanent outsider and what the price of that is. And has been. I think we’ve forgotten. We’ve forgotten a lot.

That’s another theme, right, memory?

Yes. And memories, remembering. What allows us to do it. Where we keep memories, how we lose them. Do they live in stories, language itself, the people around us? And what happens in exile when we separate ourselves from all of that.

It’s not a perfect book, but there’s still a lot of meat there. Or maybe I should just say food.

There really is. We look forward to your next book which we look forward to publishing. Thanks for talking to us.

My pleasure.