‘Bookworm’ Host Encourages Reading Between the Lines

Nasal-voiced and soft-spoken, Michael Silverblatt, host-producer of KCRW-FM’s (89.9) long-running Thursday afternoon show “Bookworm,” wants listeners to have a sense of eavesdropping. In taped discussions with authors, he neither prepares questions in advance nor challenges to the point of argument. Instead, he has “conversations,” and if these sometimes meander, so be it.

“I don’t want to impose my ideas on an interview. I want the writer to be thinking out loud,” said Silverblatt by phone on a recent morning. “Sacrificing the possibility that we might not have the unity that a more directed interview might have, I feel we have a profundity and an intensity. . . . It’s meditative, it flows naturally, [with] the depth and exploration of a psychoanalytic session.”

All of this is currently on display in “Women, Writing and the Imagination,” a series with nine female authors, which began Jan. 27 and runs through March 23.

“It’s not every season,” he said, “that you have Isabel Allende [‘Daughter of Fortune’], Joyce Carol Oates [‘Blonde’], Susan Sontag [‘In America’] all coming out with books. Right now women are doing the most interesting work in fiction. I don’t know why. It just seems to be.”

Not all are works of fiction.

The inspiration for the series came late last year after Silverblatt, who created “Bookworm” in 1989, saw Annie Leibovitz’s “Women”--a compilation of photographs showing, he said, “images of every kind of woman, of battered women and women who are supreme in their intellect and physical capability,” beginning with an essay by Sontag. He already knew he wanted to talk to Sontag. “The subject was there for me to find. . . . Wouldn’t it be interesting to see if we could examine all these books in the light of a woman’s consciousness?”

At 47, Silverblatt is an unabashed, Brooklyn-bred intellectual who retains almost childlike enthusiasm about books and “Bookworm.” “You may have to listen on tippy-toes because we’re talking about serious things, but they’re for everyone, and trying to figure out how to talk about our best literature in ways that are accessible is a thrill to me.”

Today’s installment is with Gioia Timpanelli, an American of Sicilian ancestry, author of two novellas contained in “Sometimes the Soul.” “Most of her fame rests on oral presentations of stories” from that tradition,” said Silverblatt. “And she’s saying, very justly, that she doesn’t want to be the voice of all the grandmothers and crones. It was particularly important to her, since this is her first book, with stories that are her own, to talk about the book.”

At one point, Timpanelli confides to Silverblatt, “I remember lying in bed [thinking], ‘Now who in the world is going to read this?’ . . . Art so moves me, I just do it. . . . I wrote it because I had to.”

‘Not Going to Turn the Tables on Them’

Next week brings Jamaica Kincaid, whose latest work is “My Garden (Book),” a nonfiction descriptive of the author’s gardening life. In a wide-ranging 30 minutes, author and host chat about Martha Stewart, the NAACP boycott of tourism to South Carolina over the Confederate flag flying atop the state Capitol, Jane Austen’s “Mansfield Park” and the impact of menstruation on a woman’s life and psyche. The latter was a topic Kincaid had asked the host to bring up. True to form, he readily accommodated.

Of the nine, only Leibovitz and Timpanelli were first-timers to Silverblatt’s table.

“Eventually, the people I interview come to know that I love writing so much that I’m not going to turn the tables on them,” he said. “The conventional idea of what a good interview is, is someone who puts the screws to the interviewee and asks tough questions. My goal is to make the interviewee feel safe, comfortable and respected enough to be able to flower and say things that they don’t usually say.”

One of the more riveting segments airs March 16. The subject is Oates’ 738-page novel, “Blonde,” scheduled for publication in April, about the life of Marilyn Monroe and the society that shaped her.

With sounds of crickets in the background--Silverblatt interviewed Oates in December at her home near Princeton, N.J.--he tells his audience: “It’s some of the best writing about Monroe that I’ve ever seen.” Several times, he calls it “extraordinary. . . . Here we’re in a novel in which Nietzsche and Freud are side by side with Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe.”

Probing the Writers’ Creative Consciousness

Meanwhile, Oates allows, “I thought of her always as Norma Jean [her given name]. At one point when she’s with President Kennedy and she’s being really humiliated, suddenly she realizes, ‘Here I am, Norma Jean; why has Marilyn brought me here?’ . . .

“I sort of felt I was giving her back her humanity, that I was redeeming her from a certain crass and crude and cruel judgment.”

The remaining interviews are with Ana Castillo, author of the novel “Peel My Love Like an Onion,” on March 9, talking about female writers in Latino culture, and Sontag on March 23, on her new novel, “In America,” about a 19th century Polish actress who founds a utopian community in California. The Sontag interview will be taped March 2.

“What’s fascinating to me,” noted Silverblatt, “is that [Sontag and Oates] are both writing on different phases of the same subject . . . a woman actress, facing the American culture. Two of the most vibrant writers on the American scene, commanding women’s voices, [dealing with] this business of playing a role, beginning again, changing your personality, what you do for an audience, what you don’t do.”

Silverblatt said he came into the project believing--as he still does--that “a good book is a good book, whether written by a man or a woman.” So the question he posed was: “Is there a creative consciousness that is distinctively female?”

“By and large, the American women I spoke to are not as involved in issues of feminism, of gender warfare,” he said. “Genders are much less defined now, and there’s much less need for propagandistic statements about what a woman is. . . . They’ve earned their voices.”

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* “Bookworm” airs Thursdays at 2:30 p.m. on KCRW-FM (89.9). Today’s installment features author Gioia Timpanelli discussing her book “Sometimes the Soul.”