Interview with Michael Joyce (1/10)

Where did Remedia: A Picaresque come from?

Funny you should ask, because of all my books this is the only one where I cannot remember either a particular moment or a sentence/paragraph that started it off. For almost all my prior novels I have had what I call a tonal segment or a seed crystal, a sentence—not necessarily the first— that I am trying to write toward or from. Instead what comes to mind is an image from my childhood that I’ve written about elsewhere, in which a babysitter (unusual to recall it as such, since like most Irish working class folk, babysitter meant aunt or cousin, and this may very well have been a teenage girl cousin) lifted me up toward the sky saying that the clouds were ice cream if you could only reach them and then, I think (memory gets strange in your 70’s, mine was strange at 20), said something about confetti and magic and how you could get it in New York City, and my being excited because I knew from my mother that my uncle, her brother, was working as a page at the NBC television studios in the city. Even I can see that this is a rather obscure and questionable link between openings in the world and media, but that’s what comes to mind. So the boy walking with his mother in the first sentence of the book may have been spawned by this memory.

What’s strange, and makes me linger on this first question, is that I cannot find anything in my, admittedly now sporadic, journal entries about the first moment of beginning to write this novel, although there are entries much later along the way. The lack of a first entry, however, may have to do more with another unusual circumstance of this novel, which is the first ever that I shared with Carolyn, giving her pages or even re4ading aloud, from the first. Although she is my first and best reader and copyeditor, I’ve never been comfortable sharing a work in progress, always waiting until the first draft was in hand. But this one, begun during spring break of a teaching term in 2015, became something of a serial, almost Dickensian (or as near as I ever could be to Dickensian) presentation to an audience of one, an unfolding that gave me great pleasure