You’re sort of blinking around and disoriented and have that what-just-happened feeling. was a little bit like the experience of waking up. And I was living in New York, on 181st street, so not the swampiest environment, but I was spending so much time in my imaginative life, in this really lush, humid, terrifying place.
And it wasn’t even the kind of thing where you can say she splits her time between the Duane Read and Swamplandia!-it wasn’t any kind of clear division, it was just this interpretive filter for my whole world. It was exciting and painful to leave that world, because it was as real as my real life for a long time, as insane as that sounds. You said in an interview recently that the interior has always been more real to you than the exterior world-ĭid I say that? Oh no! I sound like a crazy person.īut it was interesting, because in another interview you said you spent “most of your 20s in that goddamn swamp.”Ĭan you talk a bit about the experience of leaving?
She apologized for her ineloquence and proceeded to speak eloquently about dream geography and horror films.
Hazlitt caught up with Russell over the phone from Philadelphia. She inhabits the predator as well as the predated, and her characters both suffer and thirst for blood empathetically. She writes the horrible with a terrifying clarity, and the stories in Vampires, though they have the character of fables, are by turns grim, disturbing, and compassionate.
Russell’s work, like that of Lewis Carroll or Gabriel García Márquez, is fantastic and insidiously dark-a backdrop against which the humane becomes starker. If you read both, you’ll know why she stayed for as long as she did: Russell’s prose gives the swamp the vividness of a dream.īut the author has moved on, and Vampires leaps time and space: to a silk mill in Meiji-era Japan (“Reeling for the Empire”), a lemon grove in Sorrento (“Vampires in the Lemon Grove”), a homestead on the great plains (“Proving Up”), a stable where presidents are reincarnated as horses (“The Barn at the End of Our Term”). Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves -published when she was just 25-including the Bigtree family, alligator wrestlers struggling to keep their theme park afloat and the subjects of her debut novel, Swamplandia!, a 2012 Pulitzer finalist. This rich, consistent world held most of characters in her first short story collection, St. Before publishing her latest collection, Vampires in the Lemon Grove, Karen Russell spent ten years in a make-believe swamp, inspired by her childhood home near Miami.
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