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J.A. Bernstein

 

Joshua Bernstein – Version 2J. A. Bernstein’s stories and essays have appeared in Boston ReviewThe Kenyon Review OnlineHarpur Palate, and Tin House Online, among other places. He is the fiction editor of Tikkun magazine and an assistant professor of English at the University of Minnesota Duluth.

On your nightstand: 

I’ve been reading a lot of Didion–The Year of Magical Thinking and Slouching Towards Bethlehem.

If you could spend a day with an author, who would it be?  

Joan Didion is so good that she gives me the shivers. Like any outstanding writer, however, she probably wouldn’t be the best company, because you’d have to be afraid of her recording her impressions. Same with Edith Wharton, I fear.

Who or what inspires your writing?

When I was in graduate school, the then-chair of my English Department, Walter Benn Michaels, put out a national search for a professor of fiction-writing. I remember him saying that he asked the candidates whether, when writing a story, they began with a place or character, to which 99% of the respondents apparently answered “character.” Evidently, Walter was partial to “place.” At the time, I thought that was nuts, though in retrospect I agree with him. Humans are mostly the same. Certainly Marx thought that, with whom Walter, I’d gather, identified, and what makes people interesting is how their environments mold them. For the last ten years, I’ve written almost entirely about Israel/Palestine, and it’s only recently that I’ve come to realize why. It’s not because the place itself is terribly interesting, though obviously it bears incomparable historical importance. Rather, it collects people from all over the globe, being the seat of three religions, and it has this remarkable transformative effect. Robert Stone captured it–partially–in his magisterial Damascus Gate. Mark Twain gets at it, too, in Innocents Abroad. But few others have, and it seems, at least in my judgment, like remarkable fuel for fiction.