Bookforum Talks to Fanny Howe About Night Philosophy

Bookforum interviewed Fanny Howe this week! Howe's newest book, Night Philosophy (Divided Publishing), "forms an uninterrupted arc that brings together fragments of her writing from the past thirty years with snippets of work by Samuel Beckett, Michel de Certeau, Henia and Ilona Karmel, the complete text of the UN Declaration of the Rights of the Child, and many other pieces of literary ephemera." An excerpt from her conversation with Janique Vigier:

Turning to Night Philosophies [sic]: The book has a unique form—scraps of past work from the past thirty years brought together with no roadmap. Did you revise your old work as you went along?

I tried to keep things as I found them and not change much at all. This was part of the experiment. Recapitulation is the word best suited to my approach to the job. First it was going to be a simple revival of a book of mine, but because of copyright rules, it was too complicated. I was staying in a monastery then and asked the monk Patrick if he had any ideas and he suggested I cut out parts of my books and this way make a new one for the two young publishers, Camilla Wills and Eleanor Ivory Weber. They came over to the Abbey to see me, from Belgium, and we worked it out in my little cottage. Soon I realized this would be difficult to do unless I found one thing that was common to the parts I chose.

You’ve written before about your editing process, in which you sometimes spread sheets on the floor and move them around, laying them out almost as you would outline a film. Did you do that for this collection?

The first one I did like that was The Deep North, which is a novel made of patches. I suppose the grasp of poetry dragged me that way—the little outbursts that don’t necessarily belong to the person whose story is being told. They are common, as if to say that the soul surrounds the body, rolls into other ones nearby. I found the only way to do that was to see paragraphs laid out like a chess board on the floor—to see how this thought would go with this act, without being illustrative or stuck.

Read more at Bookforum.