Henriette Lazaridis

photo credit: Sharona Jacobs

Henriette Lazaridis is the author of The Clover House, which was a Boston Globe bestseller. Her short work has appeared in ELLE, The New York Times, New England Review, The Millions, Pangyrus, and more, and she has earned a Massachusetts Cultural Council Artists Grant. She is a graduate of Middlebury College, Oxford University, where she was a Rhodes Scholar, and the University of Pennsylvania. Having taught English at Harvard, she now teaches at GrubStreet in Boston. She founded The Drum Literary Magazine and currently runs the Krouna Writing Workshop in northern Greece. She writes the Substack newsletter The Entropy Hotel.

Lazaridis's new novel is Terra Nova.

My Q&A with the author:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

I had a hard time settling on a title for Terra Nova that could signal not only the narrative of my two Antarctic explorers James Watts and Edward Heywoud, but also the story of Viola Heywoud, the woman who loves them both and who remains in London. My placeholder title was Had We Lived, a striking phrase I drew from one of Robert Scott’s final messages from his race to the South Pole. His race against Amundsen had inspired my novel, but that title didn’t capture Viola’s story, and, powerful though the phrase is, it didn’t really capture the ideas of exploration and ambition that I wanted for the book. Finally, after trying After Images (too soft) and An Undiscovered Light (didn’t sound good read aloud), I settled on Terra Nova. It’s a reference to Scott’s Antarctic expedition by that name, but it also stands for all the new territory that each of the three characters in my novel is striving for, including Viola in her art and in her work for the women’s suffrage movement.

What's in a name?

I knew right away that I wanted Viola to be Viola. In my mind, she had a bit of Shakespeare’s Viola in her, from Twelfth Night, in the sense that she crosses between traditionally male into traditionally female worlds. Early on in the novel, there’s a recollection of a moment when Viola puts on her lover Watts’ clothes and then photographs him in a pose typical of a female nude. To me, this is a way of taking Shakespeare’s Viola into the gender roles of the early twentieth century.

As for Watts and Heywoud, honestly the names came right away, as I began to write. I decided just for fun to spell Heywoud that way to sneak into his name a bit of the conditional: would.

How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your new novel?

My teenaged self would recognize the fascination with Antarctica, because I’ve been obsessed with that continent and with Robert Scott since I was seven years old and saw a documentary about the race to the Pole. But teenaged me would be a bit miffed at any suggestion that an Antarctic explorer could be anything but noble. And yet, that’s the key question for me in this novel: what would a different, less noble, explorer do upon discovering his rival’s flag already at the Pole? Not everyone is going to be as stoic as Scott was.

Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?

I had the hardest time with the ending of Terra Nova. I had three characters and I didn’t think all three of them should be ok when the novel ended. But I wasn’t sure how they’d align. Would Heywoud and Viola stick together? Would harm come to Viola—likely at Heywoud’s hands? Would Viola and Watts run off together? All were possibilities, but it took me a while to figure out what Viola would do, what she would choose. The beginning was, in a way, easy to start. I knew I was starting in Antarctica. I was nervous to begin, but woke up the first writing morning and joined my two men on the ice, moving little by little towards the Pole.

Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?

There are elements of me in each character I write. Or, let’s put it this way: I have some of the same questions that my characters have, though I might answer them differently, and I experience them in different situations. Viola and Watts wrestle with how to make their mark as artists, and that is surely something I think about. Heywoud wrestles with leadership, and that’s something I care about as an athlete, a teacher, a good citizen.

What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?

For Terra Nova, I had a weird and, to me, energizing set of influences. Twelfth Night’s Viola, for one. But also and especially Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, for the way that the monster and Victor Frankenstein are dependent on each other for their identity. They can’t live with each other, but can’t really live without each other. And one more: Michelangelo Antonioni’s film Blow-Up, in which a fashion photographer enlarging photos in his darkroom realizes he has captured a murder scene by accident in the background of his photo-shoot. I knew early on that I wanted a Blow-Up moment in the novel, and, thus, some manipulation of photographs to be an important element of the plot.

Visit Henriette Lazaridis's website.

Writers Read: Henriette Lazaridis Power (May 2013).

The Page 69 Test: The Clover House.

Coffee with a Canine: Henriette Lazaridis Power & Finn.

--Marshal Zeringue