Ruth Ozeki on objects and observation

THIS WEEK on the GWA Podcast, I interview one of the most important, pioneering and impactful writers and novelists working today, Ruth Ozeki. 

In this episode, we deep dive into looking, writing, observation and perception in a fascinating discussion that traverses objects, the written form, imagination and memoir.

She is the author of four novels, My Year of Meats (1998); All Over Creation (2003); A Tale for the Time Being (which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2013 and won the LA Times Book Prize); and more recently, The Book of Form and Emptiness (for which she won the Women’s Prize for Fiction) – an extraordinary novel centred on 14 year old Benny who, after his father dies, begins to hear voices, with other objects in a magical realist sense taking on roles to speak. Ozeki’s work is powerful, it breaks boundaries and reinvents storytelling and often melds ancient ideas with contemporary ones – looking at how they relate to our technology, religion, politics or pop culture. 

In addition to her writing work, Ozeki is a Zen Buddhist priest, ordained in 2010 and a role that has influenced her two most recent novels; and a filmmaker, hailed for her 1995 work Halving the Bones, that looks at three generations of Ruth’s maternal family history from Japan, to Hawaii and to a suburb in Connecticut. 

But, aside from this, it is also Ozeki’s non-fiction work that I highly admire, in particular her 2016 book “Timecode of a Face” – a part-memoir, part-experiment – influenced by a Harvard art historian that saw her sit in front of a mirror for three hours and examine her face as she traces each line, mark, crease and feature back to story from her past – which I cannot wait to get into in this episode!

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Katy Hessel: @thegreatwomenartists / @katy.hessel

Sound editing by Mikaela Carmichael

Artwork by @thisisaliceskinner

Music by Ben Wetherfield

https://www.thegreatwomenartists.com/

THIS EPISODE IS GENEROUSLY SUPPORTED BY OCULA: https://ocula.com/