An Interview With Jeanette Winterson
by Rachel Pepper
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It's the perfect literary lesbian fantasy. You're alone in a ritzy San
Francisco hotel room with
the supremely
talented writer Jeanette Winterson. You're sipping room-service
champagne and
laughing about literature, romance, and her collection of hard-earned
cookware. During a whirlwind tour of the United States to promote her
new novel, The PowerBook, Jeanette Winterson (well known for her 1985
autobiographical
novel
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit and a slew of other books),
cozied up with me,
champagne in hand, for a lovely little
chat.
PlanetOut: Welcome to San Francisco, and thank you for the
champagne! Congratulations on
your wonderful new novel, The PowerBook. What's the reception
been for it so
far?
Jeanette Winterson: It's been received incredibly well. People
just seem to want something
that's both
about real values and the culture we live in. And that's what I try to
do -- give them both
things together.
PlanetOut: Tell me a bit about your creative process.
JW: Well, I'm a very fertile, imaginative person. When I work, I
work very
intently. Nothing
else intrudes. But when I'm not working, I don't even think about it. A
lot
of the real
work goes on subconsciously, when you're doing other things, and you
just
have to trust
that. It's not like knitting. You can't do just so much every day. You
have
to know when
it's time to buckle down and not let anything get in the way of it.
PlanetOut: What do you think of the state of queer writing?
JW: I'm only interested in doing good work, and all I want to
read is good work.
It's about the
quality of the writing; that's what really matters to me. I don't think
you
can let anybody
get away with stuff that's badly written simply because it's politically
correct, or
fashionable, or it's for the cause. It's really important to do good
work.
And I position
myself as a writer within the whole body of literature. I don't want to
decide who my
readers are. No male heterosexual writer thinks of themselves as a male
heterosexual
writer. They just think of themselves as a writer. We are just crazy the
way
we want to
put ourselves in boxes. The whole point of queer culture is to get out
of
boxes, and not
have other people label you. And yet we're so willing to do it to
ourselves.
PlanetOut: Why aren't there more really great lesbian writers?
JW: Too much of lesbian writing is just therapeutic. It's not
professional. There
are plenty of
books that have their moment, but they aren't going to last the course.
Calvino, T.S. Eliot,
these are writers who last. Look, I'm not an enemy of popular culture,
but
much of
current lesbian literature is simply not going to last. Too many people
who
don't know
how to write, do. It's a very bad idea. But really, there aren't that
many
good writers out
there, period.
PlanetOut: I loved the sex scenes in PowerBook. So much writing
about lesbian sex is
sloppy and
embarrassing. How do you craft those scenes so well?
JW: I really want to avoid the embarrassment factor. Too much
sexual writing is
piled up with
adjectives. I simply make the verbs do the work. And the reader has to
do
some of the
work as well.
PlanetOut: What about those juicy stories about you sexually
servicing married women
back when
you'd first moved to London. ... What was it for? Tupperware? Or was it
cookware?
JW: Tupperware! I beg your pardon? Listen, babe, I cost more than
that! The story
is better
than the fact, so I never minded it, since it blew up into such a
hilarious
story. But the
truth is, when I was a young thing, I had left university and came to
London.
I used to go
to a lesbian club there, where a lot of older women used to go, many of
whom
were
leading double lives. This was in the early 1980s, and these women
hadn't
been touched
by feminism. They were all in their late 40s or 50s and they expected to
live like those
terrible pulp-fiction novels, where you kept the husband at home and you
went
out and
took pleasure wherever and whenever you could.
I used to meet quite a lot of
these
women in the clubs. Some of them I went out with. Quite a lot of them I
had
sex with,
and they wanted to give me presents! And I was just starting up in a
flat at
the time and had no money and I thought saucepans would be a great idea.
See, they had to
buy things
that they could conceal on their credit cards, since their husbands
would be
paying. So a
pair of cowboy boots wouldn't have been appropriate! But a saucepan --
that
was great,
because she could just say to her husband, well yes dear it's in the
cupboard, and he
wouldn't know! So now I have a marvelous collection of French saucepans!
PlanetOut: Tell me about Peggy, your partner, and your life
together.
JW: We've been together 11 years now. It's a true-life romance.
She used to be
married, and
now she's mine! We live in the country, and grow most of our own food.
Cabbage,
cauliflower, pumpkins, carrots, beans, lettuce. We have chicken and
sheep,
dogs and
cats. We've got 18 acres of land, and my garden is about a half of an
acre.
Of all the fun things I've earned from my
success, my
space in the countryside is the best.
PlanetOut: Your new book partially takes place on the Internet.
Are you a big fan of the
Internet? Do
you spend lots of time online?
JW: No, I'm not a big Web surfer. If I'm doing my e-mails, I'll
go on and have a
look. It's a
time question. My life is pretty full. I never think "Oh, I've got an
extra
hour or two, what
shall I do?" So I use it in a very directed way -- maybe I only play
around
for an hour a
week.
PlanetOut: Do you think you'll be selling your books online at
any time in the future?
JW: No, I don't think I'll be selling my own books on line. I
don't want to turn
myself into a
publisher or a distributor, because then I won't get any work done. But
I
will be striking
an e-book deal in the near future, probably with my current publisher.
PlanetOut: Future plans?
JW: I'm working on the screenplay for my novel Sexing the
Cherry. The Passion is
in development now with Miramax. I traded that in for a bin-bag full of
cash!
And I'll be doing
24 four-minute, online, low-budget episodes for the BBC, which
you'll be
able to download three
times a week. These will be available next summer. Check my Web site at
JeanetteWinterson.com next year for details. We just fully got the
Web site up
and
running. We've had 18,000 hits since September -- it's amazing!
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