Singular Interviews: JOHN CROWLEY

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Marianne Porter's latest Dragonstairs Press chapbook, Singular Interviews, will be offered for sale at noon Eastern time this coming Saturday, and sell out shortly thereafter. A quarter-century in the making, each of my interviews with a science fiction or fantasy notable is exactly one question long. In the coming week, I'll be posting three of the interviews on this blog. Here's the first of them:

SINGULAR INTERVIEWS:  JOHN CROWLEY

 

QUESTION:  You have been working on Aegypt for rather a long time, and you're currently years from completion of this enormous four-book project.  Why are you engaged in such a large and time-consuming single work?

 JOHN CROWLEY:  God knows.  God help me.  For having ever started this.  When we are young we think that life will go on forever.  When we grow older, we realize that life has shapes.  It's time, it seems to me, to find out that the largest stretch of my creative years is going to be taken up with a project that will probably be the major thing that I do in life.  That's scary.  That's a terrifying thought.  You try to preserve possibilities.  You try to have a life that continues to open out, even though you know it doesn't.  And the idea that it doesn't, and that life has shapes, is borne in on me as I work on this book.  It's not like I will go on and write dozens of books.  I don't know what they are.  No, I know what they are, and I am already in the middle of writing one of them.  I don't know why.  I wish I knew.

 

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