Tea Obreht is a Serbian-American writer. Her debut novel, The Tiger’s Wife, was a New York Times bestseller and a National Book Award finalist. Her second novel, Inland, was published in 2019. Obreht is the winner of the 2011 Orange Prize for fiction and was a National Book Foundation 5 under 35 honoree. Her short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, The Atlantic, and have been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Non-Required Reading.
Maya Dobjensky (MD): Both The Tiger’s Wife and Inland center the strange and beautiful relationships between humans and wild animals. What is it about the animal/human divide that fascinates you?
TO: I’m very fascinated by a couple of dynamics between people and animals. The first is that we have a tendency to ascribe a certain kind of goodness to animals, and therefore a goodness to the people who caretake animals. I’m interested in how that lets people get away with a lot.
I’m also really fascinated by the paradox of how we tend to think of the purity of animals. There’s this growing notion that our presence has sullied the world – which it has – and that animals, removed from us, live this pure existence. And yet, the animals we place the most value on are the ones we can anthropomorphize and see reflections of ourselves in. Animals are an interesting canvas on which to paint character and to skew character reliability.
From a craft point of view, I like the textural aspects of animals. I think they’re fascinating to write about and to try to capture in language. I always approach describing an animal as if I’m describing it to someone who’s never seen it. That’s something that I find endlessly fascinating. Perhaps it’s an indulgence, but it gives me joy.
MD: Death is so woven into the landscape and plots of both your novels, from wars to drought to the companionship of ghosts. But while there are so many dead people in your books, few of them are truly gone. Do you see your writing as a resurrection of some kind, a way to honor and make permanent those who have been lost?
TO: Writing has always been a way to process mortality for me. There’s always a mix of the more ethereal aspects of death with the body horror aspects of it. My writing can’t get away from the space in which it’s possible to commune with the dead, to have a second chance reckoning with those who are gone. I believe in hauntings, but I’m not entirely sure I believe in an afterlife. My writing likes to keep that door open all the time.
MD: Isn’t just the fact of being a ghost an afterlife?
TO: That is as close as I get to accepting the possibility of a concrete afterlife, something with a physical manifestation. So yes, it is a way to allow the mind to wander onto that plane and imagine what it might be like to be a ghost. I think in Inland in particular, there was a lot of reflection on how ghosts work and how they don’t work, and realizing that in that universe, they were not actually able to communicate with each other, only with living people. That was key to opening up the novel because of what it meant about Lurie and his existence, both as a living person and then as a specter.
MD: What role does magic serve in your work and your life beyond your work?
TO: The kind of mythos I was raised with had two planes of the supernatural. I think this is very reflective of Balkan history. There used to be a very strong pagan mythos in the area that was derived from Slavic and Germanic lore. There were a lot of woodland spirits and a huge connection to nature as this wellspring of magic. This sort of loops back to your first question about animals – that they might be conduits of a supernatural plane as well.
Then, in accordance with occupation by empires that held Abrahamic religions, you have this overlay of a monotheistic church or mosque-based religion. It’s a structured, public religion. It is supernatural, but it’s tied to your real-life by these concrete mechanisms. The tethers are very real. They involve taxes, an intrusion into your home and lifestyle, a recognition of your identity in the public sphere.
And then there’s this quiet personal magic that has to do with older traditions. The fact that your grandmother will say something like, “I used to go to the witch in the woods.” Magic, for me, always has to do with trying to access that private space.
That’s in line with how hauntings work as well. It’s this very private, very individual moment that a person can experience. It isolates them because they’re not able to share that experience with other people. Even if it’s described, or even if it influences the decisions they make, they’re not quite able to allow others into it. In that sense, it’s a spiritual dimension of the character.
It’s a role in my personal life too: that door is always open as well. I’m constantly in fear of being haunted or seeing something that I’m not going to be able to explain or share with others, and by which I will be isolated. At the same time, I live in fear of it, I’m often inviting it as well.
MD: One of the interesting things about your answer is that it could be applied to death if you take it out of context. This thing that happens to everyone but is ultimately unknowable and extremely private. So, it makes sense that you’re playing with both those things in conversation.
TO: Totally. I was raised with a lot of stories that, now that you’re saying this, I wonder if that connection is even more concrete. Death is often an embodied character in Slavic fairy tales. He wanders the earth and intrudes in people’s lives. People have these private, individual, horrifying meetings with him. That was a very early framing of death for me. I wonder whether that connection is tied into a general understanding of magic for me. Magic and death come from the same place. They are all just living there in the same compartment.
MD: Where do you think the line is between literature and folklore? Do you find there are certain things you can’t translate from oral tradition to the written word?
TO: The communal aspect, for one thing. The closest thing is that we go to a reading and someone tells us this story. But ultimately, the book is meant to be private. If you and I go to a reading together, we’re going to get one chapter, and then we’re going to go home and read the book individually, and then maybe come back together for a book club. The book club is this attempt to reintroduce reading to the communal experience. But the whole form has taken on an individualistic shape. The relationship is between the writer and the book and then the book and the reader. Oral storytelling is meant to exist in a communal space. It’s meant to be told to a crowd. People are supposed to be under its spell together. In that respect, I think it’s more reminiscent of theatre than literature.
Folklore has to do with belief. It has to do with fundamental bedrock beliefs about the relationship between life and death, if not morality and immorality. Literature seeks to dismantle beliefs or interrogate beliefs.
MD: Inland is not a traditional western in many ways, one being that it’s in conversation with the colonialism traditionally present in the genre. Nora gives in to certain harmful myths. How did you represent this mythos without perpetuating it?
TO: It was a big struggle. There were a lot of steps to deciding how to interrogate the relationship between the myth of the American West and its very real, very colonial, very destructive reality. At first, when I was researching the camels and trying to find a way into the story, it seemed clear to me that it had to have these two sides. It had to have this homesteading side, which was going to take place over the course of a day with the camel already there. Then there’s this other side, the journey of how Lurie and Burke got to the homestead. As I did more research, I found that when the camels were brought to California, they were there for a while before the experiment fell apart at the start of the Civil War. They were auctioned off to various mining enterprises all over Nevada and Arizona. Of course, some of them escaped. There were a lot of stories about Native people of those areas, specifically in the deserts of Arizona, coming across camels at the turn of the century. I was like, oh, there’s a potential to have this facet of it as well. But those stories existed in the private exchanges of family members. It was a very private facet of an already unknown story. Because it was based on true stories and because those accounts existed in such small slivers, and because I come from a culture in which you have to really earn stories, no matter how I bit it, I couldn’t reconcile swiping one of those stories and using them in my book. They really belonged to somebody. Those are the stories that should be told by the storytellers who own them. We don’t hear enough from Native American voices. We don’t include Native American perspectives in any assessment of this country nearly enough. Though I believe that you should write across difference, I couldn’t reconcile doing it for this project.
Then what became clear was that I had to interrogate that aspect from some other direction. You want to protect your characters. I very much wanted to write Nora as a 19th-century woman living with 21st-century perspectives. But ultimately, it was impossible for many reasons. It became clear that Nora would have to be completely subject to the tendency to demonize Native people, the tendency to fear and propagate that fear. She’s a liar. There are several big lies that sit at the heart of her life. And many of them involve her very knee jerk reactions to Native people and to what she needs to tell herself as a colonizer. That wasn’t an easy thing to inhabit. It was ultimately the only way that I could critique from within that perspective. There was no way I was going to write the book without that critique.
MD: Speaking of public and private stories, the stories colonizers tell themselves are very public.
TO: Absolutely. And there’s a reason this whole mechanism exists to keep the other side of that story private. You look around the world, and you see how hard oppressed, occupied, and colonized populations have to work just to get their stories to become public.
MD: A character in Inland, Hadji Ali, or Hi Jolly, was a real person. What was it like to fictionalize a real person, especially one largely overlooked by history?
TO: I was intimidated by it. You really hope that you’ve done right by the person, especially since history itself didn’t. But it’s impossible to know. Ultimately you have to complicate the person. They can’t just be good. That’s not doing service to them either. There were things that I sought out about him in different accounts and then tried to extrapolate. We know he was born in Ottoman occupied Syria, that he was a Christian who converted to Islam. I think all my assumptions about him were based on a couple of things. One was this conversion and what it meant to be an outsider in his own society. He was isolated from the center of society by the fact that he wasn’t Turkish or Muslim. He headed into the center of his society. But I think when you’re a convert, you’re always going to be an outsider. A convert is always learning. What became interesting was thinking of him as an anxious person. That was a doorway into his state of mind and his desire to know whether he had finally arrived at the right place. Then I wondered, having come over to the states, would he know that he was part of the hammer as opposed to the person being hammered? How would he respond to evidence of the oppression of indigenous people? Would he recognize his role in that? I think he probably would, but what would he tell himself to balm it over?
Then finally, he appears in a couple of newspaper stories from California. One details how he rocked into the newspaper office in Arizona to remind them he had been part of the camel corps. He was a big storyteller, and he wanted people not to forget. Another story was about a barbecue put on by the German community of Los Angeles. They didn’t invite him. So, he drove his carriage with two camels attached through the barbecue. I thought, so he has a temper, and he’s prideful. I tried to build the pillars of his character based on these facts. It was quite fun. There was quite a lot in the story that exists in the gaps. We never see him wreck that barbecue, but I thought about it a lot. I’m one of those writers who needs to have a backstory for every tertiary character. To have it already handed to me was unusual, and it really helped.
MD: I read that the idea behind Inland came to you from a podcast called “Stuff You Missed in History Class.” Where do you normally look for inspiration when trying to write?
TO: Everywhere. I listen to a lot of podcasts, often about history, ephemera, and the grotesque. So that’s not an unusual source. One of the reasons I was drawn to the Western genre was because when we were traveling around the Mountain West, we’d go into these little towns with little museums. The people who worked at the local Historical Societies are just unbelievable history buffs. They’ll tell you the most incredible stories that are known to, like, ten people in town. I love obscure anecdotes and unresolved fragments of this chaotic narrative of history that dwell in these marginalized spaces. I go looking, but there are too many to tell.
MD: When researching a new project, does the research guide your interest, or do you start writing and fill in the details as you go?
TO: It’s a bit of both. You’re always trying to strike a balance between what the book is asking of you and what you actually need to contribute. With Inland, I read all the information I could before I started writing. Then when I started writing, I didn’t read those diaries again. I tried to let there be enough room for the imagination to do what it needed to do; otherwise, I knew I was just going to replicate Beale’s diary.
The opening section with Nora and Toby down in the gulch is the first thing I wrote. After I had read all these diaries and realized maybe there was something there, the first image that came to me was a woman and a young boy standing in this ravine, looking at tracks. I wrote that scene, then I wrote up the gulch and into the house. And then I realized I didn’t know anything about Arizona. I didn’t know how a printing press worked or what newspapers printed. So I would stop writing, do a ton more research, then bring that back and let it shape the story. Then I’d let the story feed back what research needed to be done next.
I spent a lot of time on newspapers.com looking through old ads. Because I was doing so much research from diaries, it became clear that I didn’t want the language in the journals to inform the way the characters were speaking. Every source I found had been written by a white man with a military agenda writing formally to his superiors. The formality was false. So the newspaper ads were a good way to get the informality of speech.
MD: Before completing Inland, you wrote two novels that you decided not to publish. Can you talk about what it was like to let go of these books?
TO: At first, I fought it tooth and nail, especially the first one. As an emerging writer, you’re so used to writing in private and making all these mistakes on the page. It never feels like anybody’s going to see it. There’s the agony of that, and then there’s, “Thank god no one’s going to see this.” I had The Tiger’s Wife and a bunch of short stories come out all at the same time. It was essentially everything I’d ever written that was publishable. It took me really long to learn that it was okay to keep on making mistakes in private. A book could be a shatteringly long, depressingly futile exercise. And then you can say, “this is not the thing,” and put it away. And that’s okay. It’s a hallway you go down. You open a bunch of doors, and none of them had the treasure chest behind them.
After the first time, I let it go; it was a huge relief because I had survived it. I really thought that if that happened, I would have a complete meltdown and never write again. But then, pretty quickly after that, I found another thing that drew my interest. It was an important thing to go through and come out the other side of. I wish I hadn’t been so resistant to it early on. But I’m not afraid of it anymore, which is good because before it was absolutely terrifying.
