Gil Adamson's The Outlander

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Poking around the bookosphere brought me to a link on Elegant Variation to an interview with Gil Adamson, author of The Outlander, one of my top picks for 2008. Great books ALWAYS deserve mention, so I thought I’d put another plug in for it.

It’s a subtle and beautifully written novel. Read my review here. Read Adamson's interview with The Morning News' Robert Birnbaum here. Most interesting to me was her point about writing a novel:

"Well, I wrote it to see if I could. I wrote it to see if I could actually write a novel. Because I didn’t put a huge amount of pressure on myself, I just decided to sort of give it a shot, it was incredibly enjoyable and so I stuck at it. In fact, when I started, I used one of my own poems as an outline. I don’t know if you’ve seen this; it’s one of the things that gets repeated…that I wrote a poem first, and then when I decided I was going to try to write something longer than a short story, I was casting about for ideas, and I remember—I’ve said this so many times I feel like I’m repeating myself—but I remember seeing Tom Stoppard interviewed on Charlie Rose, I think it was, and he was making jokes about himself and saying he has no ideas, no ideas at all, I have an impoverished imagination so what I do is that I steal from others. You know, Shakespeare, he steals from Shakespeare to write Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, and I thought, Well, I can steal from myself, that seems reasonable. So I took one of my poems and just literally used it as an outline, and obviously it very quickly departed from the poem and it had its own DNA and it had its own trajectory, and it just sort of drove itself forward."