Cold New Climate is the debut novel from Isobel Wohl, and the first novel published by Weatherglass Books. To celebrate its publication, we’re posting this chat between Isobel and Damian Lanigan, co-publisher at Weatherglass, to find out a bit more about Isobel and her writing.
Hi Isobel. So you've moved back to Brooklyn?
Yes! I moved back a year and a half ago, after seven years in London. I grew up in Brooklyn, then went to Harvard for two years but actually wound up coming back to the city to finish my undergraduate education in Studio Art at NYU, and then I lived in Manhattan afterwards. So apart from the couple of years in Cambridge I’d spent my whole life in New York City before I moved to the UK.
Why did you decide to move to London?
I felt like I needed a big change after spending so much of my life in New York. I liked the idea of exploring another major city and living in Europe. And I’d been to London as a tourist and enjoyed it. So I applied to do my master’s at the RCA, and I got in and decided to go for it.
Was it hard to settle in London as an American?
Not at first. Because I moved there as a student, I had a ready-made social group, so that made everything much easier. And as an American, and particularly as a New Yorker, certain things felt extremely familiar. On top of that, London is so incredibly cosmopolitan that you don’t feel like you stick out. But then something would happen that would catch me off guard, and I’d realize that the UK and US are in many ways completely different. I think it actually got more difficult as I started to understand the UK better.
Did you always write, even when you were chiefly focused on visual art?
No! I wrote a lot as a child and teenager, and then when I became more interested in visual art I quit. And then I slowly found my way back to it.
Did you read differently after you moved to England?
I definitely began to read more contemporary British fiction, and more writers published by London small presses. Joanna Walsh’s Hotel had a huge impact on me. When I read it, I was trying to figure out if I was going to write seriously again and how to do that, and I was also doing a PhD in Fine Art, in which writing could become part of the creative component, if I wanted it to. Hotel offered me a way to build relationships between physical objects and narrative outside of any previously defined form or genre, and this was very influential on my PhD and a lot of my writing about artworks and exhibitions, as well as on my fiction. In 2015 I developed an intense obsession with Claire-Louise Bennett’s Pond, especially the frequently quoted passage referenced in the book’s title, in which the narrator tells us that it would be disappointing if there were a sign next to a pond that said “pond”--a label--because it would ruin the sense of wonder one can have when looking at the natural world. I was--and am--very interested in how language relates to the material world, which I think comes from my background in art: what language captures or makes clear and what it veils or makes distant, and how these two functions and many others can come together to create writing that's somehow more than the sum of its parts. More recently, I absolutely loved Murmur by Will Eaves a deeply empathetic and beautiful novel.
We asked you to write a novel having read some of your short stories. Were you daunted?
No, although I was very surprised. I immediately thought of the scraps of what would become Cold New Climate, languishing somewhere on my hard drive. I’d begun working on the project a few years before but had had to put the work aside, and I had always wanted to pick it back up. I suppose I had an intuition that the premise would carry me through the process of writing, because I was so interested in it and because I knew that it had to be a novel and not anything shorter. Of course there were many challenges as I continued to write, but at the outset I had a great sense of momentum.
Cold New Climate is your first novel; can you tell us a little about how the idea evolved?
It was after Trump was elected. I was thinking about resentment and disappointment, and how they motivate people to do things they otherwise might not do. Or maybe those emotions give people permission to do what they’d really like to do—tough to say. But the basic situation came to me as a way to explore revenge. Which I think is interesting: that it wasn’t fundamentally about sex, at least not when I started writing the book.
Lydia is a complicated character. Did your views of her change as the book progressed?
Yes, I think so. I do feel sorry for her, and I always have. I don’t think she’s a bad person--if that's even a useful concept, which it probably isn't.
How did you decide between first person and third person?
Honestly, I never really considered writing the novel in the first person. I think I always wanted to be able to pull back, in addition to showing the characters’ perceptions and thoughts. It seems necessary to allow some uncertainty about how Lydia and Caleb understand what’s happening between them. And a more impartial third person is used more and more as the novel progresses.
Do you read fiction while you're writing it?
Yes, but I try not to read anything with a narrative that’s too closely related to what I’m working on.
Do you have a strict daily writing schedule?
I want to! I can’t keep to one for very long. It’s more like little sprints: a few days of good adherence there, and then a messy day, and then back to the routine. I do my best to make sure I write in the morning.
The book has a very surprising and revelatory ending. Was the idea for that there all along?
Not at all. I have no idea where it came from. It was a big surprise to me too.
Are there similarities in terms of creative process between how you make art and how you write?
I write in lots of little pieces and then edit the text together. So, in a way, yes: my paintings tend to be pretty layered, so there’s a similarity there. But I think there are some inherent material differences. You can tinker with a sentence forever, but if you keep tinkering with a brushstroke you will have a big mess. And when I write I revise a lot. In a physical artwork there’s a material limit to that, which is actually useful, because it becomes obvious that you’re destroying your own work. In writing you have to exert the discipline yourself.
I am also a big fan of copying what I’m working on, either by hand or retyping from a printed draft. It’s great when I’m stuck, because I usually find something in the writing I’m copying and begin to riff on it. It also makes me a more honest and adept self-editor; when it comes to figuring out whether a sentence needs to be altered or cut, my emotional reaction as I actually make the same words again on a new page is often more trustworthy than my thoughts as I stare at my screen or print-out. You could say that this shows an inclination towards the materiality of the writing process.
Are you working on another novel?
Not quite yet. I’d like to be. The fiction I’m working on now feels sort of in between forms: the ideas don’t seem to have quite enough ballast to become novels, but they also want to reach beyond the short story; I'm not used to the extreme economy any longer. I’m hoping they’ll resolve one way or another. Maybe one of them will turn out to be a novel, or something new will present itself.
Thank you Isobel, we're very pleased that Cold New Climate is our first book.