First Draft: A Dialogue of Writing is a weekly show featuring in-depth interviews with fiction, nonfiction, essay writers, and poets, highlighting the voices of writers as they discuss their work, their craft, and the literary arts. Hosted by Mitzi Rapkin, First Draft celebrates creative writing and the individuals who are dedicated to bringing their carefully chosen words to print as well as the impact writers have on the world we live in.
Article continues after advertisement
In this episode, Mitzi talks to Sarah Chihaya about her new book, Bibliophobia.
Subscribe and download the episode, wherever you get your podcasts!
From the episode:
Mitzi Rapkin: One of the ideas in Bibliophobia that you talk about which I really never thought about – I mean, I probably should, since I’ve been doing this podcast for almost 12 years, and I read a book a week – but you said reading is a creative act, and that isn’t something that I would ever allow myself to believe so I was wondering if you could share more about that idea?
Sarah Chihaya: I’ve thought a lot about this. It’s never been a doubt in my mind that reading is an act of creation. It’s an artistic act and it’s a way of using the book as a way to use your imagination, instead of sort of having reading be passive and saying, well, the author’s delivering this to me. It’s, I think, a more active participation, where you bring yourself to the book also, and you make the book come alive. The book, you know, without a reader is just a bunch of papers, like a book without a reader is no one ever knows that it’s Sarah, so it’s a sort of tree in the forest falling without anyone to hear it kind of thing. I think that reading is an activity, and I think it would, in some ways, be more beneficial to all of us to remember that it’s an active pursuit, rather than a passive one. It’s one in which, certainly, information is given to you, but also you choose to take it right? You choose what you will do with it. You choose how you’ll interpret it. You choose so many things in the act of reading. This is getting kind of woohoo, but I wonder if the book is also sort of wondering about us. You know, there’s the very famous end of Toni Morrison’s Jazz where on the last page, the book is looking back at us and is saying, I have loved you this whole time. I have waited for you. I’ve waited for you to lift my pages. And so, I think that having a kind of relationship to books that acknowledges that they are what we make of them, you know it takes some of the sole responsibility off the author, and it also empowers the reader, right? It allows us to think, Well, I’m not just being manipulated by this book, I’m choosing to feel these feelings. I am allowing myself to feel these feelings or not. It’s not just a matter of waiting for the book to take you in, it’s a willing suspension of disbelief but it is also a generous act of being open to receiving what this book wants to give me.
***
Sarah Chihaya is a book critic, essayist, and editor. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The Nation, New York magazine, The Atlantic, and The Yale Review, among other places, and she is the co-author of The Ferrante Letters: An Experiment in Collective Criticism. She has taught at Princeton University, New York University, and UC Berkeley. She is currently a contributing editor at Los Angeles Review of Books and lives in Brooklyn. Her new book is Bibliophobia.
