This week’s installment of Ten Questions features Xiaolu Guo, whose novel Call Me Ishmaelle is out today from Black Cat, an imprint of Grove Atlantic. In a recasting of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, a teenage girl borrows her brother’s trousers and takes up the life of a sailor. By 1861, Ishmaelle is aboard the Nimrod, an American whaler whose crew includes Quakers, a Taoist monk, a Polynesian harpooner, and Captain Seneca, a free Black man for whom hunting the “white devil” of the whale is an existential imperative. Ishmaelle recognizes the tortured insanity behind his quest; at times, her own burden of gender feels like a condemnation. In the Financial Times, Catherine Taylor wrote that “Guo’s unstoppable energy propels this old tale forward into new and exciting waters.” Kirkus agreed in a starred review, calling the book “a rich addition to Melvilliana.” Xiaolu Guo is the author of the novel A Lover’s Discourse (Grove Press, 2020) and the memoirs Nine Continents (Grove Press, 2017), winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in autobiography, and Radical (Grove Press, 2023). She lives in London and Berlin.
Xiaolu Guo, author of Call Me Ishmaelle. (Credit: Cristobal Vivar)
1. How long did it take you to write Call Me Ishmaelle?
Three years of research and two and a half years of writing.
2. What was the most challenging thing about writing the book?
Describing the Victorian upbringing of my main character Ishmaelle, and writing about the American Civil War period which is the background for most of my seamen. But really the most difficult part was to find a convincing and strong voice for my protagonist Ishmaelle.
3. Where, when, and how often do you write?
I write mostly at home, but also in cafés, libraries, and sometimes on trains and in airports. I write everyday, and I don’t feel good if I don’t write for a day unless I am on some enchanting and beautiful tropical beach on that day.
4. What are you reading right now?
Federico García Lorca and Mathias Enard. But also Dream Count (Knopf, 2025) by Chimamanda Adiche.
5. Which author, in your opinion, deserves wider recognition?
I don’t think there is a single one, but many authors, especially many women authors from the non-Anglophone world who have struggled to be translated and should be read by more readers.
6. What is the biggest impediment to your writing life?
Losing the appetite for life and living. And physical health.
7. What is one thing that your agent or editor told you during the process of publishing this book that stuck with you?
They remarked that writing this historical novel is a bold and new voyage for me, since I came from a Chinese culture background and my writing is very much documentary and autobiographical. Also I came from a diaristic writing style.
8. If you could go back in time and talk to the earlier you, before you started Call Me Ishmaelle, what would you say?
Many unknown things are possible, many unexpected turns of events will arise.
9. Outside of writing, what other forms of work were essential to the creation of Call Me Ishmaelle?
Research, and more research. Then, conversations and exchanges with trusted friends and writers.
10. What’s the best piece of writing advice you’ve ever heard?
Continue and persist.
