Trudy Lewis

Oyster River Pages: How is your art or writing informed by current social and/or political issues?

 Trudy Lewis: “Night Music” concerns creeping fascism and racism in Nazi Germany.  While historical parallels can certainly be simplistic, I believe that this material provides a lens through which to view the current challenges to American democracy. Before I began the project, I was writing contemporary fictions about the fallout from the 2016 elections.  But, oddly, I’ve found that this indirect historical approach actually allows for more scope and insight.

ORP: We often think of ourselves as writing or making art, but the process often changes or makes us as well. How do you feel like your writing or art makes you?

 TL: When I was a student, my teachers told me that I needed to pay closer attention to be a better writer.  So I did.  But now I think that being a writer, someone on whom “nothing is lost,” as Henry James said, makes me a better person.  If nothing else, it certainly makes me more adventurous. In researching the current project, I traveled to Germany and France, read up on German literature and history, studied examples of Expressionism, and tried my hand at painting.
 

ORP: If you could add a prologue, an epilogue, or an addendum to your piece, what would it say?

TL: Actually, I have written both a prologue and an epilogue to “Night Music,” since this piece is an early chapter of a novel about Charlotte Salomon, the German-Jewish painter who was murdered in Auschwitz just after completing her astonishing series, Life? Or Theatre?  But for the purpose of this interview, I will merely note that leaving school is just the beginning of Lotte’s education.  

ORP: What do you hope readers or viewers of your piece take from it?

TL: I hope that “Night Music” will draw readers’ attention to the amazing artist Charlotte Salomon and perhaps inspire them to view Life? Or Theatre?  on the Jewish Cultural Quarter website. https://charlotte.jck.nl/ Beyond that, I hope to help the reader inhabit Salomon’s story, especially those spaces that remain cryptic and mysterious.

ORP: How has the COVID-19 pandemic changed your relationship to art and writing, either in the creation of it or the consumption of it?

TL: The COVID-19 Pandemic has not radically altered my composition process; rather, it has reinforced my steady monastic approach to the art of fiction. It has also confirmed me in my determination to make art in the moment, without worrying about the reception or outcome.  I am reading at about the same rate as well.  But sometimes, I feel I am consuming prose differently, not just for pleasure or illumination, but as a kind of lifeline to rationality, continuity, and the human voice.

Trudy Lewis is the author of the novels The Empire Rolls (Moon City Press) and Private Correspondences (Goyen Prize, TriQuarterly/Northwestern) as well as the short story collection The Bones of Garbo, winner of the Sandstone Prize in Short Fiction (Ohio State University Press). Her fiction has appeared in American Short Fiction, Atlantic Monthly, Best American Short Stories, Cimarron Review, Cream City Review, New England Review, Prairie Schooner, Shenandoah, and others. Her story “Night Music, 1933” appears in Issue 4.1. Trudy is a professor of English/Creative Writing at the University of Missouri. Find her at https://trudylewisempirerolls.me/.