Madeleine Watts is a writer of fiction, stories, and essays. Her debut novel, The Inland Sea, was shortlisted for the 2021 Miles Franklin Literary Award and the UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Writing. Her writing has been published in Harper’s Magazine, The Believer, HEAT, The White Review, Literary Hub, The Paris Review Daily, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Irish Times, Bookforum, and Meanjin among others. She is the winner of the 2015 Griffith Review Novella Competition. Madeleine grew up in Sydney, and sometimes Melbourne. After a decade living in New York, she is now based in Berlin. Elegy, Southwest is her second novel.
1. Why do you tell stories?
I think I’m less attached to telling stories than to writing in general. Writing is something that I’ve always been drawn to, since I learned to read (and maybe even before that). There are certain things you can do in different artforms which you can’t do in others, and what I’ve always loved about literature is that it allows you to be inside another person’s head. In many ways it’s the most intimate of artforms, allowing you to say and evoke ideas and feelings you can’t represent any other way. Writing is the best way I know of getting inside other people, and it’s the way I’m most interested in being human.
2. Without talking about plot in any way, what would you say Elegy, Southwest is about?
It’s about grief and loss, and it’s a love story. It’s about climate change and marriage, about landscape and memory. It’s a road trip novel, and a novel of meditation. It’s a lot of things at once!
3. There’s a part in the book where the protagonist, Eloise, is reading an Elizabeth Bishop poem, and she says: “‘Who was erased in that struck-out “your”? Was I the beloved? Or was it the poor husk of the person left behind, rendered suddenly second person?” Can you tell us about the elegiac use of the second person? Did the story suggest this voice to you, or did you always know you wanted to use this perspective?
The honest answer is that the book came out that way – the very first sentences of what became the book came out in second person. After a few pages, my ‘MFA brain’ would switch on, telling me that people didn’t like second person, and so I tried it in straightforward first person, and third. But it was always rubbish any other way! The second person is very intimate, and I began to realize it was that intimacy I wanted. I started thinking about ways to justify it in the book – why is Eloise telling Lewis this story of a trip he was present for? What does she have to tell him? Why is she speaking to him? And the answer to that is that she has a lot to tell him, things she couldn’t tell him on the trip in question, and things she wants to tell him now that he’s gone (which isn’t too much of a spoiler). I also like the way the second person disarms the reader a little bit, the way it can prompt emotional reactions, and I would often turn back to recent books I thought had drawn on it really successfully – The Friend by Sigrid Nunez, The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson, and On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong.
4. As married couple Eloise and Lewis drive through the desert, arid landscapes of Nevada, Arizona, Mexico, the reader is given a visceral impression of vastness, spectacular beauty, as well as mass consumerism and kitsch, while their marriage unravels. What is your relationship to the evocative and politically complicated terrain/landscape of your novel?
I moved to America in 2013, right after I graduated from university (and only recently left it, for Berlin). I always lived in New York but I spent a lot of time in the southwest – my ex was born and raised there. And when I first visited, I completely fell in love with the landscape. I’ve always put this down to the plants – there are a lot of Australian plants growing in the cities of the American southwest, and I felt this uncanny sense of coming home to a place that was completely unknown. That feeling was what got me interested initially, and I quickly became obsessed with water in the region (again, I grew up during drought years in Australia, which has made me quite attuned to water). So to one extent, I think that landscape really typified my experience of trying to understand who I was in America and what I cared about, and it was also sort of inexplicable in the way that love often is.
5. Each chapter begins with a list of what’s to come in the preceding section, reminiscent of the descriptive subheadings of nineteenth century travel writing. What kind of travel writing is Elegy, Southwest?
Oh that’s a great question! I call those sections ‘indexes,’ and I had seen them in nineteenth century works of science and travel – they’re very much a product of a type of writing that claims of be able to know and understand the world. When I began writing the book, I tried to read a couple of iconic works of twentieth century travel writing about America (Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley, William Least Heat-Moon’s Blue Highways) and found them running really counter to what I was discovering I was interested in. So when I began thinking about what kind of road trip story I wanted Elegy, Southwest to be, I discovered that I really wanted to turn away from travel writing that claims to really know or understand a place with authority. So the index is drawn from those authoritative 19th century books, but they don’t guide you through the book and they really muddle one’s sense of what’s important. What they are is an emotional guide to each chapter more than anything else (they really reward a second reading of the book!)
6. What were you under the influence of (books, authors, ideas, art, or anything else) while writing this book?
The biggest influence on this novel was W.G. Sebald’s Rings of Saturn. It was a book I’d read during university and not understood at all, but people whose work I liked kept citing it as an inspiration, so I returned to it in 2020, during the pandemic. It was a real gift, because it gave me permission to write a different kind of novel, different to a traditional, realist ‘novely’ novel, let’s say. I was also extremely influenced by American road trip stories told by outsiders to America (Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, Peter Handke’s Short Letter, Long Farewell, Jean Baudrillard’s America, Simone de Beauvoir’s America Day By Day). There were also a lot of films that were important to me – Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas, and Alice in the Cities, Robert Altman’s Three Women, Roman Polanski’s Chinatown. And then there were the ‘ideas’– I’m extremely influenced by Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement and The Second Body by Daisy Hildyard, which both influence how I think about climate change and storytelling. And there were two books about the American southwest which set my mind blazing – Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner and Ecology of Fear by Mike Davis.
7. You hold many significant threads with narrative elegance: climate change/ motherhood & miscarriage/ relationships/ ecological collapse/ mental health/ art/ grief/ love). How do you handle the relative weight & gravity of all these threads during the composition process?
This is where revision comes in! Often what I was trying to do was allow one aspect of the novel to mirror another. It was a quite intuitive process, and sometimes I didn’t always know where I was going when I first sat down to write (I plan a little, but I don’t plan out a whole project before I start it). For instance, when I finished the first draft, the land art narrative and the miscarriage were completely absent. It was in re-reading the first draft that I realized they were necessary plot elements, and so they were woven in. A lot of it came down to the way it felt when I re-read things – I wanted everything to have equal emotional weight, and I also wanted to leave the reader with some ambiguity at the end of the novel. I read over and book tens, maybe a hundred times, before I was happy with the balance.
8. The novel features an artwork in the desert that is essentially, tonnes of dirt excavated to form a vast hole. Can you tell us a little bit about this artwork? What does visual art give us that the narrative arts can only fathom?
I was super interested in American land art, and the way it intervened in the landscape in a way which I find both incredibly beautiful and incredibly hubristic – much the way I feel about the development of the American southwest. I was fascinated with artists, all men, like Robert Smithson, Michael Heizer, Walter de Maria, James Turrell, and Robert Irwin – the piece, ‘Negative Capability,’ and Lawrence Greco, came together under the influence of reading about them all. One of the things that comes up a lot in the book is the tension between Eloise and Lewis around language – Eloise is always trying to put things into language, but Lewis finds it very often constraining and suffocating. The experience he’s looking for is really typified by that piece of land art, which affects them both in a place outside of language.
9. Which adjectives by readers and reviewers used to describe your writing, most please you?
I really love it when readers have an emotional reaction to my writing – a few people have reported crying reading Elegy, Southwest, which is the biggest compliment. When reviewers have praised the structure and movement of the book, I’m pleased, and I’m always happy when people appreciate the prose itself, the quality of a sentence. So, let’s say ‘beautiful,’ ‘masterful,’ and ‘devastating’.
10. Tell us about your natural writing habitat.
I currently share a writing space with my husband, Vijay Khurana, who is also a writer. It’s a room with all (or at least most) of our books, and two desks. We don’t write in there at the same time, we take turns. I find it really hard to write without access to books – I have a lot of marginalia and notes in my books, and I’ll often rove around and pull them out to consult as I write. I also tend to have lots of objects on my desk of sentimental value – a paperweight my dad gave me, a piece of fabric my sister embroidered, a Glücksschwein (lucky pig) from my friend Mathilde – and I have a lot of pictures tacked to the wall which spark off whatever big project I’m working on at the time. But the most important thing is focus, so I have software (Freedom) that blocks me from using the internet, and my phone has to be in another room, ideally turned off. Often, if I’m feeling restless or Vijay is using the writing room, I go to write in libraries, where I’m free of distractions and everyone else is being quiet and studious as well. This (northern hemisphere) summer I won’t be teaching for the first time in two years, and it will be blissful to have nothing to do but write every day.