Camilla Grudova Recommends...

“When I started university, I wanted to be an art historian and classicist, I thought my first book would be about Greek sculptures, not a work of fiction. The places I love most in the world are museums. I love the tin cans and bits of wrought iron at the Victoria Albert Museum; Sir Hans Sloane’s collection of leaves, shoes, shells, and ancient vases at the British Museum; and this collection of strange Victorian cat paintings at a tiny museum in rural Ontario. I love the act of translating an object into words, the goal of doing it well enough that it will rebuild itself in the reader’s head. I love how characters and odd situations that don’t exist sprout from artifacts and artworks like moss when I look at them. When I look at a piece, I think, I want to make the written equivalent of that, like elderly Bergotte in Proust’s The Captive who becomes giddy looking at a ‘little patch of yellow’ wall in a Vermeer painting, regretting that he did not write as it was painted. I suggest to any writers that they go to a museum soon, and find an equivalent of elderly Bergotte’s little patch of yellow wall before they meet their demise, as elderly Bergotte did, on the floor in front of the painting.”
—Camilla Grudova, author of The Doll’s Alphabet (Coffee House Press, 2017)