Alexander Weinstein, "Understanding Great Art and the People Who Make It"
It’s December 11. Alexander Weinstein, author of Universal Love, respects the velvet rope.
How would you describe your story?
ALEXANDER WEINSTEIN: A series of fantastical and absurdist short tales masquerading as Artist Statements.
When did you write it, and how did the writing process compare to your other work?
AW: The first piece came to me while visiting the Tate Modern in London. I really love the museum and have a great admiration for performance art, experimental and modern art, and installation work. At the same time, reading artist statements and descriptions of work can sometimes be near comical given one is looking at a large green dot or an upside-down urinal. I'd been reading a lot of Borges and Martone at the time and was very interested in playing with stories that pirated existing literary forms as well as creating triptychs/quartets/etc. I began writing at the museum and then worked on the subsequent pieces over the next months. The work was in tandem with a fictional tourguide I was writing (to a recently discovered eighth continent), full of museums that ate people and hotels of loneliness. In both of the projects I was exploring how to tell stories that exist outside of the "traditional" short story form. In general, I tend to be more classical (albeit speculative) in my writing, with stories solidly based in elements of fiction, such as character, conflict, and narrative arc. It was incredibly freeing to be playing with this new form while exploring humor, absurdity, and magical realism.
What kind of research went into this story?
AW: Honestly, I tend to avoid research at all costs. When absolutely necessary I'll dive in, but for a lot of my fiction not understanding how something functions is really beneficial for dreaming up imagined worlds or futuristic technology. In this case, however, you could say I'd spent a long time "studying" the field, as I'd been immersed in performance art and dance theater during my undergraduate years and so I felt quite familiar with the kind of art world I was playing within.
What, to you, makes the short story a special form? What can it do that other kinds of writing can’t?
AW: One of the wonderful things a short story can do is create a world in miniature. The concision of the form is its brilliance, and when working in short form there's a great deal of creative pressure to make sure each sentence and scene is in service of the story. Ultimately, there's very little allowance for anything that doesn't add to the magic of the whole. In some ways this can be quite a strict form. Novels are wonderful because they allow such incredible expansiveness, which I think is also one of its great pleasures, but with the short story there's a great deal of focus on the tiny gears that make the watch tick. It's like working with snow globes or dollhouses, this working in miniature, and because of this smaller container, the short form allows me to play more readily with lyrical metaphor. The short story also allows a huge range of experimentation that can otherwise be difficult to sustain over an entire novel. In this way, short stories give me a chance to land in a world, to be enchanted, and then to take off for completely new terrain in a subsequent story. It's a wonderful way to continually explore fiction in new and playful ways.
Where should people go to learn more about you and your work?
AW: You can find me at alexanderweinstein.com. My short story collections are Children of the New World and Universal Love, and the film After Yang was adapted from my short story, “Saying Goodbye to Yang.”
What's the best gift you've ever been given?
AW: A guitar. My parents gave me it one Christmas before college. It was an odd present since I didn't play music at all, and while I was grateful for the gift I wondered if I'd ever play it. All the same, I brought the guitar with me to college and there I met a wonderful group of friends who were also musicians. They taught me how to play and I fell in love with singing and songwriting, playing during my undergraduate years and eventually heading off to busk in Europe. In many ways that gift opened the world to me.
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