In October 2021, Diane Williams published her tenth book of fiction, How High?—That High (Soho Press). In 2000, she founded the independent, not-for-profit literary annual NOON, which she continues to edit and publish each year with the help of a small team of dedicated editorial assistants. Her personal literary archive, as well as the archive of NOON, was acquired in 2014 by the Lilly Library.
NOON is one of the last print journals to accept only submissions sent by mail. The address of a Manhattan postbox—care of Diane Williams—is provided on the journal’s website, along with instructions to include a stamped, self-addressed envelope for reply. No cover letters or previous publishing credits are necessary for consideration, and Williams reads every submission that comes in. NOON is also one of the few print journals that fully earns its physical existence—it’s a carefully designed, handsomely produced object, with full-color reproductions of visual art alongside its elegant pages of text.
Like her books that came before it, How High?—That High is challenging, surprising, unsettling, and very funny. I’m convinced that Williams—as a writer and as an editor—has access to some hidden, ancient source of energy and inspiration. Reading her work, and the work she publishes in NOON, unfailingly encourages me to write my own: it’s like a little lever has been cranked in my head. She gives attentive readers the sense that anything in life can be written about in a dynamic, heroic way. The horizon expands with limitless possibility—the most sublime gift.
Williams and I spoke by email in September 2021.
Kathryn Scanlan: When did you start writing?
Diane Williams: I could say that the inaugural year was 1965, when I studied with Philip Roth at the University of Pennsylvania. I had a story in The Pennsylvania Review that I was proud of, “The Goddess,” in 1967.
KS: In an interview with John O’Brien, you mention studying “English literature, and sculpture, and drawing, and many ‘ologies’” at the University of Pennsylvania. Did you have the idea at the time that writing stories was something you wanted to do, or was it a surprise to discover your interest in it? Had you read Roth’s work prior to signing up for his course?
DW: I thought of myself as a dancer during those years. I also loved life drawing and creating likenesses of family and friends. I do not remember measuring my interest in writing. And it may be difficult for you believe just how empty of ambition I was back then.
Prior to studying with Roth, I had likely read Goodbye, Columbus, and then following the course, was keen to read all of his books during the sixties and seventies.
KS: Do you still think of yourself as a dancer? Because I remember that from other interviews—that you were a gifted modern dancer who began practicing at the age of eight—and it’s pleasing to me to think of you as a writer who dances but also as a dancer who writes stories. Your work has the poise, discipline, physical grace, and sudden, disruptive turns I associate with demanding, rigorous dance—something like the Martha Graham technique, which has been described as “powerful, dynamic, jagged, and filled with tension.” To me, the compact, expressive, irreducible quality of any story by you suggests a completed movement, a piece of performance art.
DW: You can’t know how much I appreciate your finding the presence of vigorous dance in my writing—and I wish I could think of myself as a dancer. I love to feel ready to dance, and certain music makes movement impossible to resist and certain stories do too.
Here’s the chance to offer a wonderful quote from Martin Buber on the subject (from Tales of the Hasidim):
A rabbi, whose grandfather had been a disciple of the Baal Shem, was asked to tell a story. “A story,” he said, “must be told in such a way that it constitutes help in itself.” And he told: “My grandfather was lame. Once they asked him to tell a story about his teacher. And he related how the holy Baal Shem used to hop and dance while he prayed. My grandfather rose as he spoke, and he was so swept away by his story that he himself began to hop and dance to show how the master had done. From that hour on he was cured of his lameness. That’s the way to tell a story!”
KS: I love this and I think it speaks to the sort of madcap struggle toward vitality, deep feeling, engagement, and stimulation that I find in your storytelling. Thinking about your characters, I picture a heavy sleeper, roughly roused, running headlong into her day on earth, pursuing pleasure, love, and meaning in a manner sometimes manic, frantic, even desperate, and often without a clear view of her object—but there’s the sense, as with the rabbi’s grandfather, that animated, agitated, emphatic speech can cure her (our) condition. Do you consider the act of writing to be curative? What about the act of reading or listening to stories?
DW: Well, I hope that some of what you say could be true, and I identify with that provoked character on the loose that you describe, except that I don’t ever sleep deeply.
I do think that the act of writing is curative. It is for me when I can yank the wrath or pain out of myself and put it over there, after having stabbed or stirred it to suit my purposes and whims. Reading and listening to stories—the great ones—is soul-preserving.
KS: Do you think you understood that early on, and that’s why you returned to writing later? I ask because given your talent and interest in other artistic mediums, I wonder what it was about writing stories that brought you back to it—and with so much ambition?
DW: No, I never understood art’s curative powers early on. I knew that I could write while at home taking care of my children. So my choice was merely practical. And it was clear to me I needed another difficult challenge beyond childcare—but the outsized ambition that soon over-whelmed me? Where did that come from?
I have a rehearsed answer that I have given, but I am still moved to ask myself this same question, while waiting for more clarity, as the demands and the character of each era of my life change—and especially these days when I feel especially whipped or emptied.
KS: For whatever it’s worth, from my perspective it seems like you’ve always been ambitious, even as a young person when you say you were “empty of ambition,” . . . I imagine it being thwarted or suppressed instead. I think about your dance teacher encouraging you to pursue your practice professionally, and your parents forbidding it, for example.
DW: Well, I was aware of feeling pride and I was quite startled by my parents’ dramatic and negative response. Was I ten or twelve? My dance instructor at Penn, Malvena Taiz, also pressed me to become a professional dancer, and my writing teacher, Jerre Mangione, encouraged me to pursue graduate work with John Barth at Johns Hopkins. Apparently cowardice intervened—or my indoctrination—that I should study instead to remain a shadow figure in my own life.
But I realize that I do not have a well-clarified concept of my own ambition. I tend to think of ambition as thrashing effort fueled by thoughts at the forefront of my mind, of the kind I experienced during the eighties, when I harried myself with slogans to keep on at the impossible task. On the other hand, if ambition can be described as the quiet acceptance of an obligation to work doggedly at difficult work, even the work of being dutiful—then, yes, I have always been ambitious.
KS: Even when you started at Doubleday after college, you’ve talked about how there were separate tracks for men and women who wanted to be editors: men were given editorial assistant positions but women had to be secretaries first. To resist the indoctrination when you did—later, after you had a family—seems to me even more impressive and heroic. You say “cowardice,” but in my view your path as an artist is the exact opposite! And it seems like this struggle contributed to the urgency and intensity of your work—its bottled-up energy and the sense the author is writing to save her life.
DW: Your description is very generous, but I remember viewing competition with other avid people as an ugly option and it made me feel afraid.
But later on, in mid-life, the bottled-up energy—rage?—was undeniable, and yes, I did feel as if I was writing to save my life.
KS: This makes a lot of sense to me—there can be that grim aspect of competition and it seems reasonable to want to avoid it. Do you think of ambition and competition as necessarily related or joined?
DW: They are certainly related, but not necessarily joined. NOON is the product of the pleasure I take in featuring my colleagues’ strong work, and I am always touched by how the other NOON editors, all of whom are ambitious writers, rejoice when we hear of a contributor’s success and notice. Yours!—for instance.
KS: I think one of the achievements of NOON—in addition to its crucial support of work that might not otherwise have a platform—is the sense of community it builds among its contributors and editors. I’m always hoping and cheering for the achievements of NOON fellows. I’ll ask it tongue-in-cheek because I doubt it has an answer, but how did you cultivate this? From my view, it has a lot to do with your strong editorial presence.
DW: I doubt there is a clear answer. You may be right about what you surmise—I just don’t know. I will also add that our NOON staff is a remarkable team of brainy and exceptionally bighearted people.
KS: I keep thinking about something you said in a recent podcast for the London Review of Books: “I think of myself often as she. What does she think? What will she do? And I pay tribute to her, or I find fault, and I see that I have these exorbitant goals and I’m very surprised, more often bewildered, because it’s very hard to do what she wants me to do.” This feels like an accurate description of the ambivalence and exhaustion of ambition, and it makes me think of something you’ve said about dance that also feels applicable to writing: “I loved choreographing and improvising, and pushing myself beyond what I thought I could physically endure.” Are there things you do to sustain or replenish yourself in order to continue your difficult work?
DW: There is the employment of habit. I am a writer—I write. I wake early these days, 4:00 a.m., and I write six days a week.
Oh, I know what I do. I goad myself—I will buy a prize for you if you finish this book.
Long ago, I told myself I didn’t care what the goad was—tawdry and base, too shaming to share here, or dignified and lofty.
KS: I wondered if looking at art might be something you do in this way, as reprieve or refreshment?
DW: Great art enlarges the spirit, I know that. Another refreshment I can count on is a day spent without specific intent.
KS: “A day spent without specific intent”—that makes me think of the sewing you’ve taken up in recent years and talked about elsewhere. From an interview with Annie DeWitt: “I bought colorful spools of thread . . . and I just started to sew every which way. I know nothing about doing this in the prescribed manner . . . I tell myself that it is not possible to make a mistake. This is perfect:— no plan, just stitch forward, playtime.”
DW: Yes, that still is exactly my view of my needlework—where in the evenings I can take refuge.
KS: Yet your writing—while being deliberately, meticulously worked—also has this feeling in it: playful, abrupt, unplanned, very free. It’s a lot of fun to read and I get the sense you have fun composing it. Do you ever make yourself laugh out loud while writing?
DW: I am very glad you find my fiction fun to read! It is a high compliment. And yes, I may laugh while composing—but this is not necessarily a sign of triumph. The next day I am often baffled by the very same passage and it needs to be stricken.
My novella, though, On Sexual Strength, when I reread it, can get me laughing. I find absolutely everything that Enrique Woytus does or says hilarious.
KS: I do too! The form of that novella—broken into short, titled sections or chapters like “Both Were Busy with Their Penises,” “I Knew I Liked Sex,” and “I Was Actually Horribly Weakened,” for example—is perennially exciting to me and I think it amplifies the hilarity. You first used this strategy ten years earlier, in The Stupefaction. How did you arrive at this approach? Was it a way to maintain the energy of your stories in a longer work?
DW: I arrived at this approach because it was the only tactic I could think of to sustain the project . . . I would have to fool myself into believing that I was writing stories. I discovered—and it was a delightful surprise—that the chapter titles in The Stupefaction create, when read on their own, a sort of parallel narrative or chorus.
KS: Would you be able to talk about your first collection, This Is About the Body, the Mind, the Soul, the World, Time, and Fate? I’m interested in how it came to be published, how long you worked on it, how you felt about its publication . . .
DW: This Is About . . . took three years to write, and a big bunch of these stories appeared in Gordon Lish’s Quarterly, but nonetheless he did not opt to sign up the book at Knopf.
He said my fiction was just too eccentric and he did not want to jeopardize the many other books he planned to put forward. (In later years, he claimed to never have said this, so his decision remains mysterious.)
He also predicted that I would “crumple up” with all the rejection I’d be sure to receive. I have not ever forgotten his exact words crumple up.
Kim Witherspoon, who was just beginning her career, agreed to be my agent—said she loved the stories—and then wrote to say she needed to withdraw her offer because she feared she’d be unable to sell the book. So I pleaded with her to reconsider. She agreed on the condition that I would not blame her if we were unsuccessful.
This was an easy bargain to make and we quickly sold the book to Mark Polizzotti at Grove Weidenfeld!—which was the outcome I had prayed for.
Everything about that publishing experience was stellar, was thrilling, and the book received a wide and positive critical response. But unfortunately Grove then underwent considerable upheaval, as it acquired new owners, and its staff was all changed out.
I was assigned a new editor, and the company was still eager to publish my second book, but Grove was sold yet again and there was more chaos.
And even though my second book—Some Sexual Success Stories, Plus Others in Which God Might Choose to Appear—fared even better than the first, the new editors were not interested in my next book, The Stupefaction, which Gordon Lish was then delighted to take on at Knopf. But before this book launched, Lish was fired.
So there was no open road forward. The Knopf staff that took on The Stupefaction made it clear to me that they would do absolutely nothing to support the book or to promote it.
KS: Terrible! But not that surprising. Do you think the book suffered as a result, in terms of its visibility and reception? Do you have a sense of why Lish was keen to publish your third book after passing on your debut? How did you come to be published by Dalkey Archive after that (Excitability: Selected Stories and Romancer Erector)?
DW: Somebody commented then, I can’t remember who, during that period, that Knopf liked to create Fabergé eggs and then crash them. As for Gordon Lish’s change of mind—he is and was notoriously mercurial. I didn’t wonder too much about his turnabout. Also, he had been consistently—throughout those years—supportive of my fiction, and he continued to publish it with frequency in The Quarterly.
I was a great admirer of Jack O’Brien—his mission and his courageous independence—and he had a high regard for my fiction. I was very lucky that Dalkey Archive Press was in the world and that Jack came to my rescue.
KS: When you were writing your first collection, did the fact that you were raising small children give you a sense of renewed or increased appreciation (or reevaluation) of language—witnessing their learning of it, teaching them how to speak and write?
DW: I have never thought of this before! What an interesting question. Raising children certainly brought extra drama, dilemma, joy, boredom, and continuous interruption.
I taught myself to work under all and any conditions. I do think my language was more naturally lyrical in those days, though I cannot be confident why.
KS: I often think about what a rare privilege it is to be able to send work to an editor who also happens to be an important, groundbreaking contemporary writer—and she will read it! Do you feel like the work of editing and producing NOON—every year for the past twenty-one years!—is a way to take a break from yourself, from your own writing, or does it feel closer than that, like a relation to or extension of your fiction? Does working on NOON influence what you write?
DW: Well before inaugurating NOON, you know, I edited StoryQuarterly for twelve years, so this vocation has become second nature.
I use the same timeworn, straw African carryall—which holds the necessary accoutrements for the job—that I have been using for thirty-plus years. It’s where I keep the blue folder for the rejection slips, the pouch that secures the Scotch tape, and the miniature silver knife—a letter opener—that was gifted to me by Gordon Lish, as he said offhandedly, “Here! You need it more than I do.”
As I weekly take up the stacks of submissions, this ritual brings to mind other earlier times when I read stories alongside Anne Brashler for StoryQuarterly—we had fun. And NOON has been so lucky to have had succeeding teams of brilliant and dedicated editors.
But evaluating submissions is a difficult and grave responsibility, and as an author who has submitted my own fiction for years and years, and who undergoes profound apprehension while waiting for the verdicts, I feel keenly the obligation to read these submissions right away and to respond right away.
Does editing influence what I write? Likely it does. I am inspired by the fiction we publish.
KS: There’s a feeling of coherence or unity in every issue of NOON that’s a testament to your vision and your sensibilities as an editor. There might be a conception among some that everything in the journal is heavily edited by you, but I know that you also publish work that has received very little in the way of edits. How do you view your role as an editor?
DW: Editing NOON offers me the opportunity to be in conversation—sometimes extraordinary communion—with other writers whom I admire. I consider this a great gift and a privilege, and if we can deepen effects, enhance the power of a piece, we aim to do this.
KS: Laura Sims wrote this about your work: “Can we allow ourselves the freedom she offers of beginning at the physical end? Some readers may not be able to accept this and similar challenges inherent in Williams’s work.” And in an interview for The Paris Review, Iris Murdoch says, “You have the extraordinary experience when you begin a novel that you are now in a state of unlimited freedom, and this is alarming.” If freedom is the ideal of art, why do you think it can be so challenging and frightening?
DW: Freedom feels like a fine thing if one also feels safe, but what about vertigo, which is certainly related? I loved to feel dizzy when I was a girl. Did you ever spin around in order to fall down dizzy?
As an adult, of course, for me, dizziness foretells physical or mental trouble, the exception being those stunning and positive psychological reformations that I have experienced, that have initially caused loss of balance. This sort of untethering—if it occurs at the end of a tale, I find it invigorating.
KS: I don’t remember trying to make myself dizzy, but I loved the exhilaration of swinging too high on a swing set or riding a horse too fast, or a bicycle, which gave me the thrill of possibility and danger I think you’re talking about—the invigoration of untethering. It makes me wonder if fiction is a way to actively pursue disorientation.
DW: Yes, I can agree with that!
KS: Laura Sims also wrote: “Williams’s relationship to religion has heavily influenced her work; she acknowledges that she has been ‘devout’ in the past—she attended synagogue as a child and still writes under the influence of the gorgeous prose and richly embroidered stories of the Old Testament.” I absolutely see this in your work and wondered if you’d be able to speak about it. Do you still read the Old Testament? Or is its influence more of a lasting, heavily made impression from childhood?
DW: I am not sure I can speak to this—the timeless lore and me. I’ll try.
Why do good people suffer? Will I be rewarded if I am good?—I want to be good. Why are we here? Are there alternate worlds? There must be a tyrant in charge—Is there?
Sadly, also at the forefront of what I learned as a child was: We are stubborn. We are hated. We are persecuted.
Yes, I still read the Old Testament. I love the Psalms and the Song of Songs. And there are certain stories I return to often—for example, Abraham’s near-sacrifice of Isaac, Jacob in combat with an angel, Jacob stealing Esau’s birthright, Jonah and the whale. I love Jonah and the whale. I may return to this one because of the narrative complications. There are so many.
Whenever I’d think of the whale tale, I could not remember its ending, and I’d have to rush to check.
I need to locate the large, lavish edition of the book that I inherited from my father, which is illustrated. Its pages are edged in gold. I love to read this edition because the print is large and welcoming, and its design promotes the notion that one has a storybook in hand.
Jonah is aggressive and brazenly insolent when in conversation with God, and he remains defiant and miserable and God is furious and scolds him.
I am no Biblical scholar, but I once read somewhere that this tale had an origin quite different from the majority of the others and may have been imported from non-Hebraic sources.
My mother, it was said, descended from a long line of rabbis, although several of my relatives I knew well were quite unrabbi-like. They were hysterical, superstitious—a bit crazy, likely driven nearly mad by the relentless pogroms.
Mother was born in Poland and possibly lived in a village of the sort that Isaac Singer so masterfully describes.
Once when an uncle visited our home and saw several carved, wooden African fertility figures that we prized, he ran out of the house screaming that we worshipped idols.
My mother’s father was dignified and devout, but hardly spoke to me. I only remember that he looked like an American Indian and that he brought us eggs and butter in a brown paper bag whenever he visited. He and my father argued about religion—perhaps in Yiddish. I didn’t understand a word.
My father was one of the founders of a reform synagogue, Solel, in Highland Park, Illinois, and remained active as a leader in its community to the end of his life.
Our rabbi then was Arnold Jacob Wolf, who was charismatic, challenging, and a political activist. His sermons and lessons were provocative. I was heartbroken when he refused to marry me because my husband-to-be was not Jewish.
And my parents’ deep unease about my marrying out of the religion was the beginning of the end of my interest in this sort of organized thought. I also began to deeply loathe saying vehemently the same thing as everyone else was saying during services, especially when it entailed a placating and obsequious refrain. The whole regimen became unbearable and untenable.
KS: Do you also consider psychology and psychoanalysis to be influential on your work? I’ve seen you reference Freud’s writings, but are there other texts you find valuable?
DW: Yes, certainly—psychology and psychoanalysis are influential in my work.
How does one research and study what should not be known, but must urgently be known?
I think that analysis and the best fiction composition are absolutely convergent in their purposes.
I have also read, as thoroughly as I was able, the writings of Carl Jung and William James—and many others, including Carl Rogers, Abraham Maslow, Alice Miller, and James Hillman.
KS: In several interviews you’ve mentioned “the ideal text,” a concept I love and am always trying to remind myself of when I work. Would you be able to say anything more about what the ideal text is to you? What do you think makes for timeless fiction, or fiction that survives the death of its author?
DW: You are right—this is the best question to ask all of the time. I ask it as a prod, as I write and as I read, especially for NOON.
Oh—but it would be wonderful to have the key to what makes art eternal. For instance, what is it that constitutes the sublime?
I love Joseph Campbell’s description of the sublime: In a conversation with Bill Moyers, he said, “There’s another emotion associated with art, which is not of the beautiful but of the sublime. What we call monsters can be experienced as sublime. They represent powers too vast for the normal forms of life to contain them. An immense expanse of space is sublime . . . you’re climbing, until suddenly you break past a screen and an expanse of horizon opens out, and somehow, with this diminishment of your own ego, your consciousness expands to an experience of the sublime.”
And Emerson’s essays are filled with exciting notes on this subject. And there is Robert Alter’s wonderful book The World of Biblical Literature that pursues the question. He posits that so much of this text has survived for millenniums not just on account of its sacred nature, but because of other fundamental characteristics.
The authors of Genesis can be both playful and subversive, and they are “able to imagine moral dilemmas and ambiguities of motivation with uncanny complexity.”
Alter quotes Gabriel Josopovici, who states that the most typical features of Biblical narrative “bring us face to face with characters who can be neither interpreted nor deconstructed. They are emblems of the limits of comprehension.”
Ethical monotheism, Alter writes, “was delivered to the world not as a series of abstract principles but in cunningly wrought narratives, poetry, parables, and orations, in an intricate patterning of symbolic language and rhetoric.”
The question you ask deserves much more time and attention than what I can offer here, but I did attempt to describe the challenge in fine-grained terms—how best one can move, word by word, through a composition—when I taught writing.
It is, of course, easier to identify what does not fall into this category—the banal, the boring, and the belated, but this is obvious. And certainly splendid workmanship and language are necessary, and courage.
All together, impossible.
KS: Often when reading your work, or the work of other writers who excite me, I have a visceral reaction—my heart beats faster, my breathing changes, sometimes I get goosebumps or chills or have to stand up and walk around. There’s a current of energy transmitted that I feel electrified and revived by. Do you ever have a similar reaction when reading? What could this be about? What does the central nervous system have to do with reading?
DW: This is the best salute to receive. Yes, I experience this. And I have experienced it reading your work.
Acoustics and cadence play a central role for certain, but I may not be able to address this subject better than Robert Graves does in his book The White Goddess: “The reason why the hairs stand on end, the eyes water, the skin is constricted, the skin crawls and a shiver runs down the spine when one writes or reads a true poem is that a true poem is necessarily an invocation of the White Goddess . . . or Muse, the ancient power of fright and lust.”
Could this be true? Well, I have thought it is for very a long time. 
Diane Williams is the founder and editor of NOON. She is the author of ten volumes of short fiction and the recipient of four Pushcart Prizes. Her most recent book of stories is How High?—That High, published by Soho Press.
Kathryn Scanlan is the author of Aug 9—Fog and The Dominant Animal. She lives in Los Angeles and is the recipient of a 2021 Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her third book, Kick The Latch, will be published by New Directions in 2022.
Photo: Sarah Wilmer
