Joy Williams, 80, has written five novels and four story collections and is the recipient of numerous awards. Her most recent book of short stories, Concerning the Future of Souls: 99 Stories of Azrael (Tuskar Rock), was published earlier this year. Her work ranges from the philosophical examination of being, belief and morality to urgent engagements with environmental catastrophe; James Salter wrote of her that she belongs in the company of Céline and Flannery O’Connor. Born in Massachusetts, she now lives in the Sonoran desert.
An earlier collection of yours was called 99 Stories of God, and now you’ve moved on to Azrael (the angel of death and transporter of souls) as the subject. What drew you to him?
I read in a WS Merwin collection his translation of Hadrian’s deathbed poem to his soul – Animula vagula blandula – so sorrowful and succinct. The soul, a worthy subject. And Azrael has always fascinated me: he was death, but not death exactly. He was more a gorgeous creation of Islam. I picture him as responsible for all the souls of this ensouled Earth.
Azrael is often portrayed jousting with the devil. How do you think their relationship works? It seems almost more important than his with God.
After conferring with Azrael once, God doesn’t communicate with him much. The devil is much more willing to engage with this splendid innocent whose duty is to transport souls, a work increasingly troubling and strange.
Tell me a little about why brevity and concision are so key to your work – some of the stories here are only a few lines long.
Souls is similar in method and manner to 99 Stories of God, which was written about eight years ago, but I find it more focused. It was written in a much briefer period of time, an enchanted time, really, for each day at my desk I knew something would arrive, a small essential piece of something larger. The brevity of these glimpsed gifts was essential to their mysterious power and effect – power over me at least. I don’t feel I can put something like this together again.
For many years, you’ve written about the climate emergency and environmental destruction. I wonder if your thinking about how to represent that in fiction has developed, and where you think it might go?
I’m always trying to convince myself that fiction will rise up and throw away the crutches that have been supporting it for far too long. The comfy story has got to change. It needs to be more uncanny, less personal.
You grew up in Maine, an only child, and your father was a congregational minister. Were there particular aspects of your upbringing that shaped you as a writer?
That does sound gothic. But it was unfashionably ordinary.
Would you describe yourself as a metaphysical writer? There are many concrete, earthly details in your work, but you seem overall concerned with reaching the kinds of truth that are not immediately observable or provable.
There’s always been this strain, a strong strain in American writing. I’ve always found an awareness of guilt, an immaterial longing and hope of transformation essential to the American voice. Cheever has it, Cormac McCarthy most definitely.
You’re not alone in this – Marilynne Robinson is one example, and in their different ways writers such as Don DeLillo, Richard Powers and Rachel Kushner. Do you think there’s a particular American tradition of this kind of writing?
Marilynne Robinson says she read Moby-Dick when she was nine. I wish I could say such a thing! I was reading horse books, dog books, the Baba Yaga stories in Jack and Jill magazine: my library card was my most treasured possession, but I didn’t read with much discrimination.
You started writing quite early in your life – you were published at 22. What kind of a writer did you want to be, and think you might be?
I wrote my first story when I was in high school. It was about a lonely girl travelling on a bus home toward some unspecified tragedy that had occurred, and her thoughts. I sent it to Seventeen magazine. They were having a fiction contest. I never heard from them. My parents said it must have been lost in the mail.
Which writers were important to you as you got older? I believe Emily Dickinson was one of them…
In college I read Emily Dickinson. I sent a paper off to a scholarly magazine about a photograph of Emily which shows very clearly the two sides of her personality, her very being; her face is practically cleaved in half – darkness and light. I never heard back from them either.
When you were studying at Iowa, Raymond Carver and Richard Yates were around. Did either make an impression on you?
I was a friend of Ray’s and his wife, Maryann. He was writing poetry at Iowa but I was in a few fiction classes with him before he left the programme: he gave me his copy of William Styron’s novel Lie Down in Darkness. I guess he didn’t need it. Richard Yates visited for a year. He seemed anxious. His collection Eleven Kinds of Loneliness had just come out and the stories seemed so antique to me. Students are cruel, of course. The last thing they want is to be impressed by the previous generation.
I read about a lecture you once gave in which you quoted Mark Twain’s phrase about a writer needing a pen that had been “warmed-up in hell” to write truthfully and substantially. What has that meant in your work?
Yes, these pens are essential to have: not enough of them available. A writer needs to be angry too and have a sense of wonder. There really is something so unfathomable about us being here.
How do you write, I mean physically and logistically? I ask because I don’t think you use a computer, or ever have.
I have a number of typewriters, all of which have something wrong with them. I sent my favourite one off for cleaning and UPS lost it. Now I don’t have a favourite. This is not ideal.
Is there a book or a writer you regularly return to?
I’m always reading poetry, and the commentaries and writings of Maurice Nicoll.
What have you enjoyed reading recently?
I just finished Mann’s Dr Faustus for the first time, and the amazing novels of Andrei Platonov. Most recently I was impressed by Ta-Nehisi Coates’s The Message.
• Concerning the Future of Souls: 99 Stories of Azrael is published by Tuskar Rocks (£12.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
