Bloom visited Fairbanks last October while researching her next novel. She spoke to Permafrost staffer Ian Dickson in poet John Reinhard’s kitchen.

PERMAFROST: Ms. Bloom, you were just telling me about how you started to write nonfiction.
AMY BLOOM: Right. The New Yorker asked me because they wanted their fiction writers to write some nonfiction. I offered all sorts of boring subjects and I hit on female-to-male transsexuals and they were like, "Good!" It was a really long piece, around 8,000 words, but they let me do it. So Random House wanted to make a book of it, which I thought was kind of a bad idea -- but not uninteresting to me -- and that’s what happened. So then I did the piece on crossdressers for The Atlantic, and when I finished that I did the piece on hermaphrodites, and then the essay on why we care about gender so much. The piece on gender ["On Nature"] was published in this wonderful little magazine called Topic, which is a great magazine for nonfiction, and unbelievably enough Oprah’s magazine published a version of that piece as well.

PF: Were you happy with the version that Oprah’s magazine published?
BLOOM: Yeah. I took out some stuff and made it more directed to a reader and less, you know, my own musings. But I kept the essential point, which is why we care, since we all actually know from personal experience that people are a mix. All of us. Why do we care? Why do we get so agitated at people who are more of mix than we think they should be? So that was what was interesting to me. Because nature is such a mix -- I guess that was the other part of it.

PF: What do you mean, "Nature is such a mix"?
BLOOM: Well, you know, in nature you have things that we think of, for example, as feminine. The display of plumage. But then we all say, "Oh yeah, but in nature it’s the males that display the plumage. That makes sense because they’re trying to attract females." Well, of course, in our culture you say, "Well you know if you’re a male and you want to attract a female you have to not display plumage so that she’ll know that you’re a real man." Things like that.

PF: After you wrote those nonfiction stories, what led you to approach the female-to-male transsexual issue in fiction in "A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You"?
BLOOM: Oh, I think I just had some stuff that was still psychologically left over. I had really been amazed by the parents that I had met in the nonfiction research. And I didn’t think I could do a fiction piece from the point of view of someone who was transsexual because I just didn’t think I could really connect to that. But I certainly could connect to the mother. I certainly could connect to the idea that one’s children might not always do exactly what you want them to. I have feelings about that.

PF: I’ve read that you don’t like -- or you’re not comfortable with -- the kinds of short, quasi-relationships that come up through being interviewed. How was it when you found yourself conducting interviews?
BLOOM: You know, what I felt about that was, you want to do people justice and you want to make the prose interesting. And in the end, it’s more important that you do the people justice. But that’s also true as a fiction writer. You’re still trying to make it move with some humor and some tension, with something interesting going on.

PF: I thought that the interview you used towards the end of that piece, I forget the man’s name --
BLOOM: Oh, Michael.

PF: I thought that was incredibly effective and had some great stuff, but at the same time it was the tensest and sounded like one of the briefest encounters that you had.
BLOOM: Well, I mean, it read as pretty brief but we sat for about six hours together. But you’re right. Getting the interview set up was complicated. He was much more reluctant than most other people, which was interesting, too.

PF: Interesting because...
BLOOM: I didn’t want people who were professional transsexuals. I wanted people who were getting on with their lives and had never been interviewed and weren’t particularly interested in being interviewed, as opposed to people who wanted to be on Jerry Springer.

PF: Were there a lot of people that you talked to who didn’t make it into the story?
BLOOM: Oh, gosh, yeah. All different kinds of people. You know: the crossdressing, working-himself-up-to-becoming-transsexual son of an Orthodox rabbi. Who was himself a rabbi.

PF: From what you wrote in the preface to Normal, I think I went into "The Body Lies: Female-to-Male Transsexuals" with the same reservations as you about people who would seek a surgical solution.
BLOOM: Right. A perfectly natural way to feel. Doesn’t mean we’re right, but it’s perfectly natural.

PF: I got the same kind of feeling reading Love Invents Us, that you’re portraying human relationships that people might gossip cruelly about, but in a way that --
BLOOM: Well, it depends. I mean, the relationship between the older man and the girl is not something that I think is healthy. But if people think that doesn’t happen very much, they are really not paying attention. And, I didn’t write it to recommend it. I was trying to describe it.

PF: I think anyone coming out of that book thinking it was good idea was maybe --
BLOOM: I have lots of angry letters saying it was an apology for pedophilia. I would say, first of all, she’s not a child. She’s a young teenager, but she’s not a child. And second of all, it wasn’t a how-to. It was just: "this happens."

PF: Why do you think you got those letters? Do you respond to them?
BLOOM: Oh, because, you know, people have time on their hands and have strong feelings about things that affect them or have had happen to them. It’s perfectly understandable. Sometimes I respond. But not to the ones that say, "I hope you burn in hell." Those kinds of words have no meaning to me.

PF: Is all of this only the natural result of working so hard to write Max [the older man in Love Invents Us] in a very human way?
BLOOM: I’m only interested in characters that are human. I’m not interested, by and large, in the writer’s opinion of the characters. I’m interested in interesting characters. I don’t want to meet the writer. I want to meet the story. And that’s how I approach my work. I assume that people are really not interested in knowing me; they’re interested in knowing my characters and my story. So I prefer to step out of the way.

PF: How do you keep your opinion of your characters out?
BLOOM: I think you have to love them. And therefore you don’t have to make a judgment or a point where you elbow your reader in the ribs and say, "Oh, like him! Don’t like her. She’s a lot like me, and you think that’s fabulous. On the other hand, this character doesn’t share my values, and that’s just awful." You know, college students, you can always tell the characters they like because those characters will listen to the music that the writer listens to. That’s how you can tell. The hero likes the White Stripes, but hates Don Ho. And you think, "Oh, I can see that’s how we can tell he’s the hero, because he’s just like the writer."

PF: So, how do you feel about Aretha Franklin and Sam Cooke and Billie Holiday?
BLOOM: Well, it’s probably true that my musical prejudices leak out in my writing.

PF: In Love Invents Us there are a lot of point-of-view shifts, quick movements from one character to another. Do you consciously think about techniques you want to try, or do they come up as problems while you write?
BLOOM: They’re not so much problems as I like to give everybody a chance to tell their story. When it seems appropriate, when it seems like they should get a chance to tell their story, I like them to. In Love Invents Us I wanted Huddie to speak, I wanted Max to speak, and it was obvious to me that the central figure would be what’s-her-name. Elizabeth. But it was important to me even to have Huddie’s wife have a chance to talk about their relationship and how she felt. That mattered to me.

PF: Does that happen in any of your short stories?
BLOOM: Yes. There’s a short story called "Fault Lines" in which a dinner party -- there are two couples -- all four people express their points-ofview before, during, and after the dinner party. And although it focuses on this couple who are going to end up kissing, it’s really from all four points-of-view.

PF: That’s something you get a lot of flak for in an undergraduate writing workshop.
BLOOM: You get flak for it if you don’t do it well. That’s the trick. All those writing workshop rules really only mean that those things are hard to do. And it’s hard to do mostly because it requires that each character that gets to express a point of view has to be a three-dimensional character. And since most people who are learning how to write have trouble making one, making four seems like a big load. You know, I love writing from multiple points-of-view. And that’s why this novel [in progress] is in the third person, so that everybody who matters to me gets to see and be seen.

PF: Now, aside from this interview, what are you doing in Alaska?
BLOOM: I don’t know! I’m here because I wanted to visit John [Reinhard] and wear my mukluks and do a little research for a novel I’m working on in which a character ends up in Alaska, in Dawson City.

PF: Do you ever write about places that you’ve never been to visit?
BLOOM: Yes! But I won’t tell you which ones.

PF: Has anyone ever called you on it?
BLOOM: People are filled with admiration for my grasp of detail! [Laughs.] No -- I do a lot of research and if I didn’t have a feel for a place I wouldn’t write about it. But this was too big. Having a big part of it set in Alaska was too much to do without coming.

PF: Can you tell us anything about the novel you’re working on?
BLOOM: It starts out in Russia, and it winds up in Russia. And in between there’s New York, then cross-country to Seattle, then up overland on the Telegraph Trail to Dawson City.

PF: Wow. Is it going to be large?
BLOOM: No. I’m not interested in those mammoth novels on steroids. Six-hundred pages. No. I am in general a believer in less-is-more. I like the short story. I don’t feel like I have to write a short novel, but I don’t have any urge to write a padded novel. Aerodynamic is my preference.

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