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| photo: Daniel V. Stanford | |
Liza Wieland is the author of three novels (A Watch of Nightingales, Bombshell and The Names of the Lost), three story collections (Quickening, You Can Sleep While I Drive and Discovering America) and a volume of poems, Near Alcatraz. Her work has been awarded two Pushcart Prizes, a National Endowment for the Arts grant and the Michigan Literary Fiction Award. She teaches at East Carolina University and lives near Oriental, N.C., with her husband and daughter. Wieland's new novel is Land of Enchantment (Syracuse University Press, March 1, 2015).
On your nightstand now:
The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher Hilary Mantel, All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr and Bark by Lorrie Moore.
Favorite book when you were a child:
Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh, which affirmed what I suspected about writing: that it was dangerous and could make your life unpleasant. But there wasn't any way to stop yourself.
Your top five authors:
Colm Tóibín, William Faulkner, Alice Munro, Henry James, Emily Dickinson
Book you've faked reading:
The Last of the Mohicans, said fakery aided and abetted all these years by Daniel Day Lewis.
Book you're an evangelist for:
Mystery and Manners by Flannery O'Connor.
Book you've bought for the cover:
Most of the cookbooks I own.
Book that changed your life:
A trio, very clear in my mind: Lie Down in Darkness by William Styron; One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez; The Waves by Virginia Woolf.
Favorite line from a book:
"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." --F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Which character you most relate to:
The first shock-of-recognition character was Catherine Earnshaw in Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë. I was (no surprise) a teenager.
Now, though, if I don't relate to at least one character in a novel or story, I usually don't continue reading. But "relate" is a funny word. I don't think of it as seeing myself in the mirror of the novel. It's more a matter of being interested in the character's world or struggle. Sometimes this happens because that world is unfamiliar.
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann.
Unsung writer you love:
Gina Berriault.