In the week of her eighty-eighth birthday — and of the publication of Frenzy, her new story collection — Joyce Carol Oates sat down with her friend, fellow novelist and Princeton colleague A.M. Homes before a festival audience in Narrowsburg, New York. The festival’s theme was time; over the following hour the two writers covered ghosts, grief, tenacity, likability, Barbie, and the dreams we try - and more often fail - to hold on to every night.

A.M. Homes: One of the themes of this year’s festival is time, and I’m curious about the difference in compression between a short story and a novel, and how you think about that.

Joyce Carol Oates: It’s really a technical question that writers might ask one another. When readers read a story, they read it as if it were seamless, organic, and fluid. But behind the scenes the writer is doing something like knitting, or purling, or chiselling. We’re putting things together, sometimes quite disparate things — I’m sure you write the same way. I have little paragraphs; I take notes in longhand. When I put it all together it’s like a mosaic, and the hope is that it reads as if it’s smooth. Much of what I do is revising.

The question for a short story is: do you want it to move fairly swiftly, gliding along, with an impact at the end? Or would you rather write something more poetic, deeper, where each paragraph has a kind of gravitas and moves in a different rhythm? It’s basically the difference between one of the classic early Hemingway stories — the early stories, not when he was older — which have no flashbacks and very little description, and start moving with the first sentence and a story by John Updike, which might begin in the historical present but immediately flash back: his father, his childhood, then a new paragraph about being at Harvard. He ties it all together, but it’s a completely different reading experience. In one instance it’s as if you start a clock going: a short Hemingway story could be ten minutes long. Ten minutes. But an Updike story — and some of my stories too — can go back and forth in time, so that twenty or thirty years are encapsulated.

A.M. Homes: Many writers describe feeling haunted by the past. Do you think the past ever becomes past, or does it remain active?

Joyce Carol Oates: The past re-emerges at different times in our lives. During COVID, at least for me, I was really alone a lot — literally alone. I taught classes by Zoom, but in my house I was alone except for my cats, and I was thinking a great deal about the past. When you’re caught up with a lot of people in a social environment, it’s like playing tennis: you’re always in motion. When you’re not doing that, you have a lot of time to look out the window, and a memory will rise up from the unconscious — of when you were five years old, or the last time you saw your beloved grandmother. These thoughts came up in a discontinuous way. I spent a lot of time looking out the window, sometimes late at night, seeing the trees thrashing around in the wind under a moonlit sky, and having these wild existential thoughts: well, Emily Brontë looked upon something like this. And Emily Dickinson. There’s something about the universal isolation and essential loneliness of the self that almost seems more valid than the self in a social situation.

A.M. Homes: I’m curious about the liminal space for writers between the present and the past — because at the end of a writing day I don’t know what day it is; I don’t know what year it is. How does writing time move for you?

Joyce Carol Oates: I don’t want to sound naive or mystical, but I think I experience time differently from other people, because it really does take me a long time to write a page. I do a lot of revising. I can’t even figure out how I wrote one book.

A.M. Homes: Can I come to your house?

Joyce Carol Oates: I’ve tried to talk about this to people and they just laugh at me. I can work a really long time on just a paragraph, and it seems that I don’t get much done at all. I’m always in a state of mild anxiety, and real anger at myself — I never seem to have got enough done. And, as you know, I make foolish mistakes all the time, because it’s difficult to actually live a life; there are so many opportunities for pratfalls and silly things. It just seems to take so long, and yet I must finish. And then I look at this bookcase —

A.M. Homes: It’s a bookstore, Joyce. Your books would fill a bookstore!

Joyce Carol Oates: I literally don’t know how I did it — I’m not joking — and yet I can’t really talk about it. Maybe I could talk to somebody like Isaac Asimov. Didn’t he write 500 books or something? But he probably wrote them quickly, typing as fast as he could. I’m not like that; I do a lot of writing in longhand.

There’s a story in my new collection Frenzy — the last story, actually — about two women who are widowed. I have several stories in the book about widowed people. These two have come through rocky, tumultuous times in their lives simultaneously but not together: they’re not intimate, they weren’t friends, but they live just a few blocks apart. The story is set at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, an area I know well. There’s woods there — pretty deep and long and kind of mysterious, with a pond — and you go from the world of reality into this subterranean world. I think it’s an experience some widows have, and maybe other people as well: you go into a fugue state where you check out of the real world, and you’re in this other world where you don’t really know what is going to happen. My widowed person is a bit suicidal, and it does seem as if she might be moving toward killing herself. She’s standing on a bridge looking down into the dark water, and she sees a reflection, as if there’s a figure next to her. She looks up, and of course there’s nobody there. It’s this feeling that in the unconscious there are forces and presences — maybe of people we knew. In another era we would have called them ghosts, or spirits. Today we don’t have the right vocabulary. I think they’re psychologically and emotionally real, but not real in the sense of being three-dimensional.

A.M. Homes: I do think that whatever we used to think of as ghosts — call them loose consciousnesses — all kinds of things exist in and outside of time as we know it. And, not to be weird, but have you ever felt you were entering bent time, or a portal of some sort? It’s a genuine question.

Joyce Carol Oates: I don’t know how to answer that. The stories are like rabbit holes — rabbit holes with a deep burrow. When you talk about it afterwards, it’s like talking about a dream, or a terrible surgery you underwent: you talk about it in an anecdotal way, but what actually happened, we don’t really know. We just keep going. It might be like swimming across a river: you’re faltering and swallowing water, and you say, “I’m just not going to drown,” and keep on swimming, and somehow you get to the other side. But the actual crossing almost defies explanation. The difference between us and people who don’t do this, or who give up, is perhaps that we have more of a capacity for stubbornness. Or masochism. Somebody could say, “I don’t want to do this — it’s too hard. I’d rather go out and bicycle.” But there’s a certain tenacity to writers. It’s like a dog with a bone, or a pit bull with teeth in the ankle: I’m not going to give up.

A.M. Homes: You’ve written quite a bit about grief. Do you think of grief — and the process of writing — as an altered state?

Joyce Carol Oates: That might be. I spoke of my fun story. To me, Fox is a fun novel, and some of these are fun stories, because men get their comeuppance.

A.M. Homes: And what exactly is their comeuppance?

Joyce Carol Oates: I don’t mean the men in this audience — I mean those awful, crude, sexist people we hear about. There are stories that arise out of grief and anguish, but the plot takes them in a direction that’s actually kind of robust, where something happens: real confrontations. No matter how anguished we might personally feel, there’s this other dimension of being in action, of dealing with somebody — and then maybe coming out of it not badly. There’s strength sometimes we don’t know we have.

A.M. Homes: You’ve written half a bookstore of story collections. Do you think about how you’re building a collection? Are you secretly amassing stories and thinking, “These ten will be good together, but I’m missing the one about the couple”?

Joyce Carol Oates: It’s more that there’s an organic thematic sameness, an identity,  to work we do around the same time. The volume of stories that precedes this one is called Zero-Sum, with a hyphen. All of those stories were written during COVID, a pretty delimited period, and all of them deal with the zero-sum game of life, or love, or even one’s profession. At the same time they move from realism — very, very realistic — gradually into a kind of surrealism, and then an almost speculative future, so the stories undergo a transformation.

In this volume the stories progress from a story of isolation, in which two people supposedly embarked on a love affair are really engaged in a kind of contest with each other: he’s in his forties, the young woman is nineteen, so it’s generational, too. The stories in the first of the three sections deal with young people dealing with older people — you could almost say young women and girls dealing with predatory males considerably older than they are. As the volume goes on, the stories move through people in their twenties and thirties, then middle age; the two widows at the end are probably in their fifties or sixties — not elderly. The movement is chronological. People are adjusting. And there’s the discovery, after you’ve lost a beloved spouse or partner, that your life is not necessarily over — something can come to you. I was speaking of things coming up from the unconscious; I think people come to us in life unexpectedly, too, and become dear friends you barely knew a year before. It only happens because of a rupture in your life. Your life is broken open — and, not that you know it at the time, that allows something else to come in later and take your life in a different direction. So the volume ends on that note, with the two women and their friendship. But it’s sort of a funny story, too. I have to laugh at some of the things that happen to some of the men in my stories. That’s one reason for writing, don’t you think?

A.M. Homes: To make yourself laugh.

Joyce Carol Oates: I teach a story of yours  to my students — only if I feel they’re ready for it, near the end of the semester. “A Real Doll.”

A.M. Homes: Which I wrote as a child.

Joyce Carol Oates: It’s the real Barbie love story that’s going on in all the households of America, and we don’t know about it. One difference between you and me is that I often have a pretty realistic set-up — I’m doing my work as a naturalist, a realist, setting the stage. You just boldly come in with your first sentence, which is stunning. You walk right on stage. I admire that; I don’t usually do that. I couldn’t begin a story, “I dated Barbie.”

A.M. Homes: I think that’s just because I forget to add description. I started as a playwright, and even the thing I’m writing now — there’s no description in it. But back to you, Joyce. Do you ever scare yourself? I know you can make yourself laugh when you’re writing, but do you ever frighten yourself?

Joyce Carol Oates: That’s a good question. I don’t think I frighten myself. I think the world is terrifying — the last I looked, at 6 p.m. or so. The fact that we’re laughing and carrying on means we don’t really know how bad things are. Maybe I shouldn’t go on along this subject. Humankind cannot bear very much reality, T.S. Eliot said, and I think it’s true. No,  I don’t think I frighten myself. I’ve had the same personality my entire life. It was formed when I was about 13 or 14, and it basically hasn’t changed.

A.M. Homes: But you do seem willing to write about and explore things a lot of other people wouldn’t.

Joyce Carol Oates: I have written stories that, if somebody else had written them, I couldn’t read them. Or I would say, “That should be censored.” But that’s exploring something that’s out there in the world. I read a lot of philosophy. I was trained in philosophy as my undergraduate minor, and a philosophical consciousness entertains different ideas. There’s not just one big opinion that is your opinion; there is something that’s the opposite of your opinion, and you explore what that is. I’m interested in multiple points of view and subjectivities, even the ones that question my position. I have personal opinions, about politics and other things, as we all do, but I can write a story or a novel in which the opposite point of view is dramatized very convincingly. It just doesn’t happen to be mine.

A.M. Homes: I have that, too. Along those lines, I was thinking about Gregory Bateson, who wrote about the interconnectedness of things — the way each interaction, each exchange, affects the next exchange. I think that’s very much in your work.

Joyce Carol Oates: Bateson also talked about the double bind, where we’re caught between two alternate possibilities, both of them seemingly right or correct. How do you mediate between the two? That happens a lot as we go through life; we have to make compromises. When I was quite young I was reading Thoreau, and the 19th-century transcendentalists — Emerson, and maybe in a way Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman belong in that luminous category — people who had strong opinions and were kind of inviolable. Then you get a little older, you’ve lived a little more, and you start to see how compromise is part of life. Adolescents are often intolerant of adults because adults are hypocrites. But when you get to be a hypocrite yourself — well, it’s complicated.

A.M. Homes: That is so good. Do you remember the first short story you ever wrote?

Joyce Carol Oates: No, because I was writing for such a long time. I was reading Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass when I was about eight or nine. We lived on a farm and didn’t have many books; this was a gift from my grandmother. I would open the book with a tablet beside me and try to draw the John Tenniel drawings of Alice, which are so distinctive. I couldn’t draw people — I never was able to — but I would draw the chickens and cats, because I was in charge of the chickens on our farm. The chickens and cats walking around as if they were people: that was my first short story.

For a long time, if people wanted to interview me, they would sometimes go and interview my parents on the old farm, and my mother would drag out the old tablets: “Joyce couldn’t write yet, so Joyce was drawing these little things.” It was so embarrassing. Page after page of really intense something going on with chickens and cats. I couldn’t write, but I would scribble, pretending to write; I thought that’s what adults were doing, just scribbling. The tablets are filled with scribblings, and it’s like War and Peace, there’s so much of it. What on earth was I doing? Hour after hour of drawings, so intense, and completely insane. Why didn’t they take it away from me?  

A.M. Homes: I think they thought you were onto something. I’ve noticed a lot of the students we teach are moving away from realism and naturalism and into the speculative and sci-fi. I’m curious what you make of that as a way of dealing with the difficulty of the current everyday.

Joyce Carol Oates: There are two kinds of students, basically. You and I both teach at Princeton, and we’ve had students in common. One large category is the students who are really scientists and mathematicians; they take computer science, and they’re very imaginative, but their writing belongs to a more cerebral, almost Borgesian world, and they’re very good at that. The other large category is more the old-fashioned, poetic, sensitive person who writes poetry and will probably write about themselves and their families. And one of the great themes is the drama of the children of immigrants. You may have a three-tier family: the grandparents from the native country; the parents, who may be born here but are shaped by that other world; and the children, who are completely American in every way — the music, the way they move, the sensibility. But when they go home, they’re going back to this other world: a language, a culture, maybe visits to the home country. That drama plays itself out again and again. I’ve had amazing short novels as senior theses at Princeton on that subject, and they’re all different.

A.M. Homes: I see it with our first-generation students, too — a real split in identity. Who am I here and now, and who am I at home? And also incredible expectations of who I’m supposed to become.

Joyce Carol Oates: It’s a lot of pressure. And it usually has a dramatic form — a young person who writes, at the end, about detaching themselves and becoming free. And I’m thinking, as an older person: <okay, you’ve done it now, but what about ten years from now>? I’ve also had students write theses who are grandchildren of Holocaust survivors — in one case, both grandparents. One young man went back to Warsaw to spend a year, completely infatuated — <haunted> — by his family history, not wanting to walk away from it at all, doing research and writing about it. All these things are at a boil in America, and I don’t think they will be resolved for a while.

A.M. Homes: I have two more along that line, and I’ll give them to you as one. The big question that comes up a lot: who has the right to tell a story? And also this idea of “write what you know” — which seems to me like, well, I would run out of things  in five minutes.

Joyce Carol Oates: Those are exciting and provocative questions. On the first: who has the right to tell stories? Iit has always been the case that the storyteller or the dramatist could do anything. Shakespeare can have Zeus walk out on stage and start talking, or Shylock, a rather clichéd anti-Semitic figure. Jonathan Swift has all sorts of weird little creatures and non-human people speaking, and nobody says, “Oh, you shouldn’t do that.”  I don’t feel my own point of view is so different from that of somebody who might be my age but of a different ethnic background; we might have much more in common than I would with somebody from my own background, from my hometown. I have written a lot from the perspective of men, and I’ve never actually been criticized for it. Sometimes people say, “Oh, she writes like a man” — and I’m supposed to be so flattered.

A.M. Homes: It’s funny — they never say that to male writers. “You write like a lady, John Updike.”

Joyce Carol Oates: Nobody has ever said that. But if a man dares to write as a woman — as a girl — today, in some cases, he would be challenged. People would say, “You have no right to do that.” The feeling is that if you’re more powerful, you shouldn’t write in the voice of somebody less powerful, because you’re exploiting their position. But if you’re not a powerful person — politically, or financially — I think you should have the right to mimic any voices at all. How do you feel?

A.M. Homes: I think it’s not so much about mimicking as really inhabiting. I often write characters who are very different from myself, and I try to think: how do I inhabit this? What is their background? What does this mean to them? That’s both the fun and the work of it: how do you organically become another person? And it’s complicated, because on the one hand there are people who feel they have not yet had the right, or the exposure, to tell their stories. But I also think there are stories we stop telling because everyone dies. There are very few Holocaust survivors left. If you can only tell the story of your own experience, we’re going to run into certain kinds of problems. It’s nuanced.

Joyce Carol Oates: I also think we shouldn’t be criticizing and judging one another so minutely. If you don’t like a book — if you feel the voice is shrill and unconvincing — just close it and put it aside. You don’t have to go online and want this person hung.

A.M. Homes: And there’s the question of likability. We don’t necessarily write characters who are likable. That’s not the goal. And that’s a big thing in contemporary literature: is the character likable? And I’m like — since <Crime and Punishment>, when was that a thing?

Joyce Carol Oates: Well, likability was a criterion for movies — Hollywood movies. There were literally rules for making movies. One was that you don’t show a man and a woman in bed together — even if they’re married, that’s just disgusting and horrible. Another was that you have to show people punished. In the 1930s, if you had a gangster movie where the gangster killed people and walked away, that went against the rules. There had to be justice. A number of classic movies ran afoul of this. Somerset Maugham’s story “Rain” was made into a movie in the early thirties with Joan Crawford. She was probably about21, and I was astonished at how good she was. She plays a former prostitute — a prostitute of necessity — and a party girl, very beautiful, and everybody’s critical of her, and you think, <Oh gosh, something bad is going to happen to her>. No: the evangelical bully who has been bullying her commits suicide, and she walks off, she gets married. And I thought, <My gosh, what a nice ending>. It was a wonderful surprise. And then I found out the movie got into all sorts of trouble, because it didn’t show the right morality.

A.M. Homes: And then, in part two, the punishment is: she got married. Do you feel there’s anything you wouldn’t write about? Is there any subject or idea that is actually taboo for you?

Joyce Carol Oates: I guess I just don’t sit around thinking, <What would I not write about?> I did write a couple of stories in my lifetime that I can’t imagine how I wrote — they’re sort of disgusting, sort of like your story “A Real Doll.” Maybe we wouldn’t write those stories now. Maybe there’s something you do when you’re bold and reckless — you think, <Oh, what’s the difference>? But then you get to a different place and you think: <My students might read this>.

In my first marriage, I asked my husband not to read my writing. He would read anything I asked him to read — nonfiction essays, book reviews, things written in my own voice — but he mostly didn’t read my fiction, out of respect for my request. Then my second husband, Charlie, whom I married a while after my first husband died, was very different. He said, “What? I’m going to read everything. It’s crazy that everybody else reads it and I don’t.” Both positions seemed feasible, but Charlie’s was no-nonsense: “I’m not going to put up with this ridiculous request. I’m going to do what I want to do.” So I felt a little self-conscious, and I hid some things.

A.M. Homes: Is there anything you would have written had you known Charlie wasn’t going to read it?

Joyce Carol Oates: I don’t actually think that much about who’s going to read things. I would send my parents my books,  except I didn’t send them <Zombie>. I was hoping they would never see it, and I don’t think they ever did. They read everything I wrote, and they were very supportive,  like dream parents. No one in our family had ever graduated from high school; the bar was so low you could just roll over it. My father was quite a reader: Dickens, any number of serious writers. My mother was not really a reader, but she read my books, and she would say, “That’s the best book ever.” And I’d say, “Mommy, do you mean the best book I wrote?” “No, no, the best book.” So I was supported by my parents in a way that was like helium gas. They were always so surprised and happy when something went well. I miss them. The world is different now.

A.M. Homes: Going back to time, and the world being different: you grew up in upstate New York. I’m curious about the way landscape and place move through time for you.

Joyce Carol Oates: This Narrowsburg area is very evocative to me — I could live here and write about this. I grew up right near a small river; we just called it a creek. It was nothing like the Delaware. But there’s something about a stream, the movement, and the mystery of it. Nearly every day of my life I would walk down to the creek and along the shore and the pebbles. I spent a lot of time walking in fields, and there are a lot of abandoned old farmhouses and barns in this area. I don’t know if you’ve ever walked into an old barn: the sunlight comes through the cracks, and there’s a smell of old hay and sunshine. There’s such a powerful, evocative atmosphere in a world like this, of hills and fields. I don’t have that feeling about a city, though I know people do — the bustle, the traffic. All of Ulysses is a sort of homage to Dublin; there’s a chapter where James Joyce just puts it all out there, all the trolleys, the names of the places the trolleys are going, exclamation points. He was living in Trieste or somewhere, remembering Dublin and putting it all down. I think most writers write from a sense of homesickness, wanting to evoke. Though I don’t know that you do.

A.M. Homes: Homesickness? No. But what I think is interesting about place is that in rural places and natural environments we have, literally, the trees and the time and space of nature — and you notice things. In a city there are so many things; here, you notice a barn. You notice a barn over time.

Joyce Carol Oates: Yes, and people loom much larger. There just aren’t that many people. I mentioned that I grew up on a farm, and the farmhouse had about three books. One was Edgar Allan Poe’s collected stories, and another was something like Best Christian Poems. Then I got books from my grandmother, who turned out to be Jewish (and that’s a whole other story), and one of them was Alice in Wonderland. When you have three books and then you get a fourth book, the fourth book is so important. Today young people — babies, even — are right on their phones, looking at screens. They don’t have that physicality, the wonder of a book on a shelf. When I did those drawings on the tablets, I was obviously emulating a book. It was formed when I was very young.

A.M. Homes: It does seem that in childhood, and in nature, there is a kind of elongation of time — and in our current daily life, absolute acceleration and compression. We’re practically about to explode from it. There’s not a lot left, time-wise and attention-span-wise.

Joyce Carol Oates: I think that actually started in the late 20th century. Donald Barthelme has stories like “City Life,” pretty short and punchy and fragmented, moving swiftly along. In contrast to a story by Faulkner, or Elizabeth Bowen, or Henry James, the rhythms are just very different.

A.M. Homes: So, Joyce, you’ve been writing for six decades. I know you don’t think about that. But if for a moment you were to step back and look at that span of time, and the scope of your mind and your work, would you have to lie down?

Joyce Carol Oates: Let’s look at it this way: Every night when we fall asleep, dream images come to us from somewhere mysterious. Sometimes the dreams seem monumental and magisterial and really lofty,  almost mystical. Other times they’re nitty-gritty, maybe even frightening. Dreams come to us as gifts from the unconscious, and when you think about all the nights, all the dreams we’ve all had — probably some of them are incredible masterpieces, like Fellini: a whole lot of beauty and weirdness and wonder, mostly in images. And yet they’re all gone. We don’t have them as a totality, and we never think of that. When you fall asleep tonight, you’re not thinking of the whole oeuvre and catalogue, the library of all the other dreams you’ve had. So too, when I’m working on something now, it’s completely in the present tense. Usually it’s giving me some difficulty, so I’m having a struggle with it. I would never think about something I wrote 40 years ago. It would never happen. I’d be more likely to think of another writer, if there were a technical problem: how did Joseph Conrad deal with a situation like this?

I find I’m very interested in switching point of view, and how that can be done gracefully — not heavy-handedly. The easiest way to write is first person, just somebody talking; third person is more difficult; and multiple points of view is very difficult indeed. But I’m tempted to experiment with it — not so much in a short story, where it’s mostly one point of view.

A.M. Homes: When you inhabit the different points of view, it allows you to experience the fullness of the story. The first person is limited by the age and experience of the character, and the other lets you pivot through time differently, because each character can be within the same story at a different point in time.

Joyce Carol Oates: But then the emotional identification of the reader is diffuse. A thriller is organized with quick cuts between, say, the protagonist and a villain, so you’re moving around. But when you’re reading the villain’s chapter, you’re not really supposed to identify with the villain. In classic third person — the kind of writing Henry James did, and most of Chekhov, or James Joyce, or John Updike — you stay with one person. You identify with that person, and you experience the story as if it’s happening to you. If you’re cutting back and forth, you’re surrendering that advantage, so you have to do something else. That’s why I find it challenging. Cormac McCarthy often has a very, very detached point of view. He looks upon people almost like ants sometimes. That’s very hard to do; everything can seem satirical, or flat. McCarthy does it in a way that’s biblical, almost mythological. But that kind of writing is so hard to do — you can sound completely phony and pretentious. I always tell my students: please don’t try to imitate Cormac McCarthy.

A.M. Homes: Not that you need ideas, but I think all the dreams you never had,  that’s at least a collection of stories, Joyce.

Joyce Carol Oates: The dreams would be interesting, but we have no way of recording them — no way of preserving dreams. I think we all have recurring dreams, and the recurring dreams through a lifetime would be just fascinating. But we can’t take cellphone pictures or videos of our dreams. By the time you’re 50 or 60 years old, you may have had literally a thousand of them. How fascinating would that be?