10 Questions for Sabina Murray
- By Brooke Chandler
No form of art can express a life quite like the novel. No art form charts the lives of individuals—encounters, challenges, and relationships—as successfully as the book-length work of fiction. Perhaps this is because of the amount of detail provided for characters and their situations, which allows us to truly experience as they do, but beyond this, the living quality of novels is best understood by considering time: the time we take to read, but also the manipulation of time upon the page. All readers casually understand this, but it is worth looking at a few scientific concepts, in particular some properties of time, to better comprehend how it works.
—from Sabina Murray's "The Order of the Novel," Volume 65, Issue 2 (Summer 2024)
Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
In high school, I wrote a short story about a girl obsessed with the ring that her recently deceased grandmother was to be buried in. The grandmother’s finger has swelled post-mortem so that the ring cannot be removed. The girl creeps up to her grandmother’s coffin in the night and cuts off her finger to get the ring. And the grandmother wakes up, having one of those terrifying conditions that makes it seem like you’re dead when you’re not. The story was a big hit, written on two pages of notebook paper that I carried around in my pocket and read to people when they asked. I was in an all-girls’ school in Manila at the time where the other big recess activities were brushing each other’s hair and singing, so I shouldn’t have let my success go to my head. But it did.
What writer(s) or works have influenced the way you write now?
A couple of weeks ago, I walked into a bookstore and bought a book by a writer I had never heard of, and it is phenomenal. The novel is The Sun Walks Down by Fiona McFarland. It’s a polyphonic narrative and one that is influencing my novel in progress and making me consider other polyphonic narratives. I was thinking about it watching the Great British Bake Off last night as the contestants battled with braiding bread. Too many strands can sink the dough unless you give enough time to the proofing, but done correctly, the effect is stunning. The Great British Bake Off counts as an influence and not a writer, but Fiona McFarland can definitely get multiple strands to work and it’s made me want to attempt it.
What other professions have you worked in?
Most of my other work experience was in high end retail. I sold shoes on commission at Cole Haan and was effective, ruthless, deadly to anyone with a shoe thing and a credit card. I also type-set birth announcements and invitations. I forged “personal” signatures for letters to donors for a senator. I was a balloon vendor at a festival. I did some rewrites on a horror film (never made) for an Australian producer. I don’t know if this counts as job as I never got paid for it, but I worked security for B.B. King when he came to Portland, Maine, which basically meant hanging out by his dressing room while he performed and making sure no one went in.
What inspired you to write this piece?
Teaching. I teach creative writing and the most helpful skill I can impart to my students is how to grapple effectively with time. Time, being a very abstract thing, doesn’t submit to language that isn’t vague. When you look at how physicists write about time, it’s still elusive, but what girds the unknown and makes it possible to be discussed are some basic principles. I was just hoping to piggyback on some of the work already done, although in a different field, in order to examine how time in the novel works.
Is there a city or place, real or imagined, that influences your writing?
My writing moves around a lot, and I have moved around a lot, and even my different characters tend to move around a lot. More than one place, real or imagined, what influences me is a constant sense of dislocation.
Is there any specific music that aids you through the writing or editing process?
I listen to Bach fugues a lot. I feel instantly intelligent when the music comes on. Whether or not that’s the case, Bach fugues make me fake it ‘til I make it. Or at least they get my pitch correct for writing. My all-time favorite writing music, however, is the soundtrack to the cannibal film Ravenous by Damon Albarn and Michael Nyman. It tracks progressive derangement better than any other thing I’ve encountered.
Who typically gets the first read of your work?
My last book, Muckross Abbey, was a collection of ghost stories, and I read them aloud to my sons as each one was completed. The stories were written for them. It all depends on the book. I tend to write books that I know nothing about until I start researching, so I pick readers who can flag errors or insensitivities.
If you could work in another art form what would it be?
I would have to be less in love with writing, which is hard to imagine. The other day I was lying on the couch with my dog in the middle of the afternoon, thoughts drifting, and I figured out the final scene of my book. Is there another art form that you can do lying on the couch with your dog? If so, I’m interested.
What are you working on currently?
I’m working on a biofiction novel on T.E. Lawrence, better known as Lawrence of Arabia. I currently have the final scene but there’s a lot more that has to happen. I will keep the dog and couch nearby.
What are you reading right now?
I’m reading Empire: How Britain Made the World Modern by Niall Ferguson. If you’ve ever wondered what Britain was thinking when it carved up the Middle East or colonized India, as many of us lately have, this is the book for you. Although it’s well-written and informative, I can’t say I agree with all of it. For example, Ferguson reminds us that during WWII, all the Commonwealth countries pitched in to help Great Britain, perhaps forgetting, for example, that the Australians, who were bombed by the Japanese in Darwin and had Japanese subs in Sydney Harbor, might have actually been fighting for themselves.
SABINA MURRAY is the author of sevenbooks of fiction including the novel Valiant Gentlemen, a New York Times and Washington Post Notable Book, and the short story collection The Caprices, which won the 2002 PEN/Faulkner Award. Her most recent book, Muckross Abbey, a short story collection, was published in 2023. She has been awarded fellowships from the NEA and the Guggenheim Foundation and was a recent research fellow at Magdalen College, Oxford University. Murray teaches in the MFA Program at UMass, Amherst.
