Office at Night by Laird Hunt, KATE BERNHEIMER Read Free Book Online

could get into the role— which means one of my first thoughts was of her body, my inhabiting it. Basically, the idea took hold immediately for me, artistically. I even exchanged emails with Sarah Schultz about whether the Walker was offering costumes to us; she sent me an enchanting photograph of a forties secretary in spectator pumps with a note that read simply, “The secret might be in the shoes.” (Laird and I actually didn’t find ourselves assigning roles bygender, in the end. Instead, we traveled as desire took us, from body to body, object to object, in the painting.) Coffee House and the Walker had such a brilliant, original concept for this: we were told the residency would be about the process of being inside the painting together as much as about the finished novella. It was smart and seductive, and I think I typed back, “Yes, please!”
    CF : What kind of research did you do in order to prepare for writing?
    LAIRD HUNT : I looked at the painting (a digital version provided by the Walker of said). Then I looked at the painting again. Then I looked at it some more. Then I covered up parts of it and looked at what was still there and what wasn’t. Then I looked at whatever marvelous ideas Kate was coming up with. Then I read up a bit on Hopper. Then I looked at the painting. Then I thought about an unfinished and abandoned manuscript of mine set partly in New York and partly in Hell’s Kitchen, in the twenties and thirties. Then I wrote. Then I looked some more. Then I wrote some more. Then Iimagined I was standing just out of sight, perhaps beyond the open door, inside the painting. Then I looked at one of my daughter’s rather elaborate paint sets and the abandoned (or all but) easel we have in the back room. Then I wrote some more. Then I looked again.
    CF : What method did you come up with in order to “collaborate,” and did you consider different options?
    KB : Looking back at the hundreds of e-mails we’ve had about this project since its inception, I realize that very early on in the process we moved super naturally into a call-and-response form of composing the novella. The first words arrived on my desk on the evening of December 30 from Laird, who sent what he called “a start on the guy in the picture.” He wrote: “I’ve named him Chelikowsky, after a colleague of my father’s from the old days. Writing it, which starts with a kind of paranoia about the open window next to him, makes me realize: he is effectively frozen, a figure in a painting, an epic instance.” Laird also asked me if I knew the woman’s name, and mentioned that he thought she was a new hire.Soon after, I wrote the first passages for Hester’s narration—in which she sets forth some complaints about the new hire, Marge Quinn.
    We collaborated via correspondence. Our many exchanges contained passages for the novella, letters to each other about the painting and the novella, and stuff about our personal lives outside of the painting (worlds colliding intensively for a couple of months). Amidst very intense discussions about the aesthetics and plot of the novella, we talked about things like Laird’s childhood in Singapore and my Chinese American daughter—who is the same age as Laird’s daughter—and sometimes we suggested cocktails to each other for the end of the workday. Bits of these personal exchanges made their way into the fiction. Even the subject lines of the e-mails became part of the story as it evolved: “Thus spake the file cabinet,” “Does Chelikowsky have a first name?” and “Hester (far from painting)” are three examples. Once we were exchanging letters and bits of fiction, we didn’t consider doing it any other way; questions, challenges, were built into the process, and I found the whole experience aesthetically thrilling. The call-and-response method challenged me technically in certain tangible ways,and it also gave me a new sense of freedom to put an idea in the story, trusting