Ask the Author: Brett Ashley Kaplan
Answered Questions (8)
Brett Ashley Kaplan
While entirely fictional, Vandervelde Downs was sparked by a memory: it’s 1979 and I am at a Vietnamese Refugee Center in the Midlands, in provincial England, with my grandmother, a Swiss Quaker who moved to England when she fell in love with my grandfather, thus scandalizing her somewhat snobby Swiss family (he was the son of a market gardener, she was on a teacher training program and firmly expected to return to Switzerland). I grew up between the very Jewish world of the Upper West Side, New York City, and the very not-Jewish world of small town England (my father is Jewish, my mother isn’t, and because she worked in the summers, I lived with my grandmother in the tiny town of Stone for three months a year). In 1979 Omi and I are at the Refugee Center to “help.” I don’t exactly know what that means, and I have no idea where Vietnam even is. But we’ve made little knitted hats and we give them out.
I wanted to see what would happen if/when multiple strands of refugeeism and migration come together with different aspects of looted art.
I wanted to see what would happen if/when multiple strands of refugeeism and migration come together with different aspects of looted art.
Brett Ashley Kaplan
Sometimes ideas just come to me: the novel-within-the novel, Rare Stuff, for example, about whales, that just came to me. Sometimes I take things I've read about or experiences I've had and morph them into fiction. Yesterday, I read an article in the New York Times about a man holding out and hanging onto his apartment on 84th Street (two blocks from where I grew up) and I thought, "What an amazing story! I could write about that!" (I won't because I'm working on too many other books!).
Brett Ashley Kaplan
I'm writing a second novel, Vandervelde Downs about links and intersections between refugees from different parts of the world all centered around a Vietnamese Refugee Center in provincial England and the aftereffects of a painting looted from a European Jewish family.
Brett Ashley Kaplan
Get feedback from people and heed it! (Not necessarily all of it--but most of it).
Brett Ashley Kaplan
Shaping and re-sculpting sentences; reaching people and engaging emotionally with other people's reactions to your fictional universes.
Brett Ashley Kaplan
I have the opposite problem--too many simultaneous projects and not enough time to write!
Brett Ashley Kaplan
I'd go to Combray, of course! The world of Proust's In Search of Lost Time and I'd be a fly on the wall and watch everyone with as much attention to detail as I could find.
Brett Ashley Kaplan
What really happened to my grandmother?
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