Creating a world
Artist-turned-writer Jill Ciment transforms experiences — including in post 9/11 New York — into books you can't put down
Published: Friday, February 5, 2010 at 11:05 a.m.
Last Modified: Friday, February 5, 2010 at 11:05 a.m.
Writer and Gainesville resident Jill Ciment sets the bar high when she's working on a new novel.
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Jill Ciment walks the beach in Puerto Rico with her dachshund, Sadie. it was, Ciment says, the last picture she had taken with her beloved canine companion.
Facts
Jill Ciment
Age: 56
Professor of English and co-director of the creative writing program at the University of Florida
Born in Montreal, Canada in 1955
Married to artist Arnold Mesches
Education: Bachelor of fine arts, California Institute of Arts, MFA in creative writing from the University of California, Irvine
Books by Jill Ciment:
"Small Claims" (a collection of short stories and novellas)
"The Law of Falling Bodies"
"Teeth of the Dog"
"The Tattoo Artist"
"Heroic Measures"
"Half a Life" (a memoir)
"I want the work to be so compelling that people are not able to put down the book until it is finished," the author says.
She's succeeded with her latest book, "Heroic Measures," which was selected by Oprah Winfrey for her summer reading list of "25 Books You Can't Put Down."
It's her sixth book, set in post-9/11 New York, that has been described as "about real estate, dog love and a city on alert" and "a 48-hour portrait of a marriage."
Recently Ciment sat down at her home on Bivens Arm to talk about her craft. It's a house she shares with her husband, artist Arnold Mesches, whose bright oil paintings light the walls, and dachsund Lola, who gnaws on a dog treat under the table.
What happened to New Yorkers after 9/11 was like nothing else she'd seen in her lifetime, Ciment says. At the time, she was living about a mile from New York City's World Trade Center.
"People became more attuned to the important things in life. There was a level of shared grief and patriotism that I had never experienced in New York," she explains. "A kind of nationalism that I had never expected took over New York, and I found that really ripe for a setting."
Ciment says in the days immediately before 9/11, she had seen a lost cat poster.
"I'm one of those people who walks through the neighborhood and looks for lost animals," she says. After the World Trade Center's twin towers fell, people began putting up flyers with pictures of lost loved ones and contact numbers.
"At first, no one would cover the lost cat poster, but eventually, the human tide completely overwhelmed it," she says. "I thought, what an interesting way to tell the story."
That was the first inkling of the book that would become "Heroic Measures."
The book is told from three points of view — those of Ruth and Alex, an elderly couple looking to "downsize" their life in the city, and their 12-year-old dachshund, Dorothy.
The inspiration for Dorothy came from Ciment's own dachshund, Sadie.
"I was a dachshund 'owner' although I was more like her handmaid, chef and activities director. She lived 16 heroic years, and went 'down' like Dorothy three times. But she walked till the end," she says.
"I think I knew my dog as well as my husband, and in the book I tried to prioritize that little dog's unique vision of the world. I tried to make it really true."
Ciment spent 20 years in New York City before moving to Gainesville to teach creative writing at the University of Florida. She and her husband still keep a small place in the city.
She says that much as she'd enjoyed the access to nature that Gainesville offers, she's still a city girl at heart. Case in point: "When a water moccasin turned up in Arnold's studio, I tried to capture it wearing a pair of oven gloves."
Ciment was working on a master's degree and doing conceptual art in California when she decided to change the course of her life.
"I woke up one morning and found I didn't want to make art that was accessible only to a very small group of people," she recalls. "I knew I loved literature, so I decided to leap before I looked."
Ciment, dyslexic as a child, says she probably never wrote a letter until she was in college. She dropped out of graduate school about 10 weeks short of getting her master's degree in art and "gave up everything art."
She devoted the next four years to reading the great writers and practicing her own craft.
"I bought the Norton's Critical Editions, starting with 'The Epic of Gilgamesh' (a Sumerian epic narrative that is possibly the world's oldest epic poem) and going all the way to contemporary literature. When I was done, I wrote my first book."
The craft of writing is extremely complex, she says. It means being able to spy on a stranger's consciousness. It involves being able to imagine a world where you provide the flora and fauna. You must have some kind of understanding of human behavior and have language that will encompass your vision, in her view.
"It takes a long time, for most writers, to burn away all your influences and all your desire to be what you are not," she concludes.
For 30 years now, Ciment has been teaching her craft to others, although she admits, "You can't really teach anyone to have something to say or a unique way to say it."
At the moment, she is reading Henry James' "The Europeans" and Jane Smiley's "Thirteen Ways to Look at a Novel."
She is working on a new novel, tentatively called "Ask Aunt Agony." That's all the detail she's prepared to share.
Ciment describes the writer's life succinctly: "To be a writer takes much more than discipline. It takes total obsession."
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