What It's Like to Be a Writer Amber Sparks
In the interview, the writer was asked if she planned to write about
taxidermy again, after completing extensive research on the subject for her
last book, and she said certainly not, because she was now interested
primarily in the perfume that Cleopatra wore, which may have contained a
base of myrrh, along with notes of cinnamon and cardamom, and may have been
housed in amphorae painted blue, the color commonly known as Egyptian blue,
first manufactured around 2500 B.C. by the Egyptians who unlike the
Western cultures valued the color, which represented for them the sky, the
river, creation, and the divine right of gods; this focus on Egypt always
reminded the writer of her favorite Agatha Christie, Death on the Nile,
though she herself had never written a mystery, and had no intention of
writing a mystery, at least not the kind anyone wants to read, and indeed
when the writer thinks of the mystery she would like to write, she remembers
a story she once read, a child watching a silent movie in a small theater,
when the piano player vanished as if by magic, erased, and only silence left
to accompany scene after scene; she would like to write not what happened to
the piano player — who probably just quit or went out for a smoke — but to
write the mystery of lost sound, what happens to a scene left utterly
silent, the rain a blank, the heroine struggling with her attacker in a
void, and the heroine's struggle reminding our writer of what she is
actually supposed to be working on, a novel about Artemisia Gentileschi, the
painter who was attacked and had her revenge through her paintings,
paintings the writer first saw in her college art history class, the one
where the professor insisted on an absolute quiet so profound that the
writer wrote a story called "The Glossary of Silence," each entry a
different type of sound within hush, and this, by the way, was the first
time the writer knew that she was a writer instead of an artist, lulled into
dreamy submission by the parade of paintings, inspired by the chiaroscuro
not to paint miracles but instead to write them, the holy light illuminated
by the careful choice of words instead of brushes, and though the writer
never believed in any god, she understood that writing and painting were the
same kind of religion, the art of making scenes so striking that someone
would stop before them — caught at first by the bright Tyrian purple of the
royal robes, or the soft glow of the fuzzy plums on the emperor's platter —
pausing until the dark dreams underneath rose up through canvas, through the
layers of paint, how serious the trauma, how sorrowful the trouble depicted;
the writer understood then that it was her job to trick the reader into
staying, to make them smell the blood on Salome's knife, the olive oil in
Cleopatra's hair, the dusty decay of the taxidermied asp in the Cleopatra
tableau at the dreary museum the writer visited in Rome while
she was trying not to write, while she was trying not to paint the words,
while she was desperately trying, to take the world as it came to her, dot
by dot, and not a single one connected.
Amber Sparks' next book—AND I DO NOT FORGIVE YOU: STORIES AND OTHER REVENGES—
is now on pre-order and will be out early next year.
Read her postcard.
Read more of Amber Sparks' work in the archive.
Detail of art on main page
by Levin Garson.
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