By
Shana Heiser
Arizona Daily Wildcat
Svoboda reading sponsored by UA Poetry Center
Obsession, not money, motivates novelist Terese Svoboda to write every day.
"I feel slightly ill when I don't get to write, the way athletes do when they skip exercise," Svoboda said.
She said that sex and death are Svoboda's central themes in her writing, which she will read from tomorrow night in Modern Languages 350.
"In fiction, I'm interested in the edge of reality, not in duplicating it,"she said. "The mind's job is to connect the dissimilar and make sense of it. That is not to say that is a theme, just what I find I'm drawn to."
Svoboda, a New York City resident, will publish her third book in March, titled "Trailer Girl: And Other Stories."
Memories from Svoboda's youth, specifically a dream and an actual Nebraskan trailer court, planted the idea for "Trailer Girl" in her mind.
"'Trailer Girl' is about a woman who believes a wild child lives among cows in the gully behind her trailer," Svoboda said. "The (other) stories have all been published in various places."
Magazines like Vanity Fair, Book, Mademoiselle and Salon already plan to review Svoboda's upcoming novel, she said.
She has also written three award-winning books of poetry, including "Mere Mortals," "Laughing Africa" and "All Aberration."
"(I) make a whole world of emotion, of place, of character out of mere words," Svoboda said.
Svoboda's passion for writing developed during her college years, yet after graduation, she continued to write.
"When I was in college, everyone was an artist," Svoboda said. "Ten years later, I was still in the arts while everyone else had become sensible doctors and lawyers."
Sex and surrealism were the two greatest influences for Svoboda and almost everyone educated in the '60s and '70s, she said.
"Sex, as in the power of feminism as well as the surprise of orgasm, imbued everything from clothing to vocabulary," Svoboda said. "(Surrealism is) the ability of language to create its own metaphorical place with its own logic."
Because Svoboda studied in Canada, her focus was on European contemporary literature instead of American.
"They stressed the French surrealists, while the popular culture was enamored of magic realism," she said.
As for the present, Svoboda listed artists such as Daniel Defoe, Anne Carson, Leslie Scalapino and A. M. Homes as major influences in her life.
Svoboda described Homes as a writer of elegant, shocking stories and Defoe as a writer of immediate adventure stories. Wilner, she said, is the "unsung genius of the American poetry, period."
SPIN magazine named "Cannibal," Svoboda's first book, as one of the 10 best novels of 1994. More recently, Svoboda published "A Drink Called Paradise" in 1999.
Her poetry and short stories have appeared in publications such as The New York Times, The New Yorker and Harper's.
Her documentaries and poetry videos have been exhibited by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the American Film Institute and PBS, but she said she prefers to write because it's less expensive than making movies.
Svoboda said she looks forward to reading her work tomorrow, because "it makes more sense out loud."
Her poetry reading, tomorrow at 8 p.m., is sponsored by the UA Poetry Center. Svoboda will also conduct an informal discussion and question and answer session Thursday at 11 a.m. in the Swede Johnson building room 205.
