Published in May Issue 36 words. Karen Russell is the author of the story collection St. This interview first appeared on Wired. Visit geeksguideshow. First of all, your first novel, Swamplandia! In development, still in development. And what those duties are are kind of fuzzy to me. One of the big ones, I think, is just the idea of having a world vast enough to sustain seasons of TV, you know? And I think the novel turns pretty tragic. Somehow I think that will be, maybe, less of a focus of a TV series, and I think the show will shift, I think it will be weighted more toward comedy than tragedy.
I have not even seen any scripts yet. I was in Berlin for ten months last year, so I was completely out of the loop. We had a couple of conversations about the palette of the show and the format and the degree to which South Florida would be, kind of, would it be more fictionalized? Would there be some kind of way to retain a couple different kinds of worlds, you know?
Osceola sort of has this very dreamy surreal quality of those sections of the novel, so is there a way to juxtapose that with the grittier, tackier, goofier parts of South Florida? So that was the sort of consulting I did, sort of about tone and about how we might broaden some of the story lines and character arcs so that you could really sustain drama over time. I was at the American Academy in Berlin, which is this sort of fabulous place.
I was their lone fiction writer. It tends to be, they have fellows comeβyou apply for these fellowships to do your project. They consider your projects and they sort of wine and dine you and you get to live in this kind of academic hostel, I guess. It almost felt too good. It felt a little Hansel and Gretel, they were taking such good care of us. It was good, it was a little like being in college again, or something, you know, a multi-generational college.
What was the literary scene there like, particularly as regards sort of surreal kind of fiction? I think they were into it! I think there are a couple of precedents. You know, the Grimm Brothers come from that country. I felt pretty surprisingly, happily understood. I feel like the stuff I write is pretty whacked out. I felt like, for whatever historical and cultural reason, that there was a good reception for that kind of thing there.
