George

Interview in the New Orleans Review

I was recently interviewed for the New Orleans Review by Erin Little of Loyola University. Here it is. My only excuse is that I might’ve had a glass or two of wine before we spoke.

New Orleans Review

INTERVIEW by ERIN LITTLE
George Bishop: The Night of the Comet

Native Louisianan and Loyola alumnus (1983) George Bishop is emerging as a fresh and vibrant voice in the literary South. His previously successful novel Letter to My Daughter (Ballantine, 2010) showcased his ability to capture complex familial relationships in an inviting, though heart-wrenching way. Since then, Bishop has delved even further into the secret lives of families—prompting his characters to admit their shortcomings and disappointments, no matter how difficult that may be. In his second novel The Night of the Comet (Ballantine, 2013) cultural phenomena give way to harrowing realizations for a middle-class Louisiana family. The Night of the Comet soars with quiet truth and a clear-eyed vision.

INTERVIEWER

The Night of the Comet follows your previous successful novel, Letter to My Daughter. How was your creative process different in writing this new novel?

BISHOP

The first novel was comparatively easy because that novel was short in manuscript, only around 110 pages. In fact, I thought I was writing a novella. I had a very clear idea going into my first novel. I dreamed the whole novel before I wrote it, so I knew what the whole novel was about. I knew the voice and rhythm before I started writing. But for Night of the Comet, I didn’t have any of that going into it. I just had ideas. I knew I wanted to write about Comet Kohoutek and I also had recurring images in my head of a man in a raincoat leaping off a roof and a broken telescope. Then I had to build the novel from the ground up.

INTERVIEWER

The Night of the Comet plays out against the backdrop of small town Louisiana. Was it challenging or natural to write about a setting you are so familiar with? Did you find it rewarding?

BISHOP

I grew up in a small town too but it was north of here—Jackson, Louisiana. The small town in this novel is a bayou city. I wanted to set it there because it seemed more exotic to me. For me, to set it in this fictitious town called Terrebonne, I might as well have been setting it in Mongolia. It sounded that exotic to me. I wanted it to be a fictitious town so I wouldn’t be tied to the real geography or history of a city.

INTERVIEWER

What inspired you to choose Comet Kohoutek to aid you in telling this family’s story?

BISHOP

I barely remember Comet Kohoutek from when I was a kid. But I do remember all the excitement surrounding it. A couple of decades ago I made a note in one of my writing journals that I thought Comet Kohoutek could be a good backdrop for a story. But I didn’t know much about the Comet. When I began researching, I discovered interesting information about doomsday cults surrounding the comet and how big it really was then. I had no idea it was that much of an event in America at the time. But then it was a huge disappointment. It became like the laughing stock of comets after its big failure. In the world of astronomy, Kohoutek has become synonymous with huge failure. I thought I could hang the story on the timeline of the comet.

INTERVIEWER

Many readers have described The Night of the Comet as a coming of age story. How do you approach that label?

BISHOP

I don’t like that label. I don’t know who slapped that on the book because I wouldn’t call it a coming of age story. But I understand why it seems like that. I understand you have to label it as something. The fact that it’s told through the point-of-view of a fourteen-year-old kid who’s going through a sexual awakening perhaps makes it a coming of age story. But I was also thinking of it as the family’s story. I see it as a family story, really.

INTERVIEWER

What influenced your choice to set this story in the 1970’s?

BISHOP

The comet was coming in 1973. I had to set it at that time, but I didn’t want to make it a period piece. I didn’t want to make it a stereotypical 70’s piece so I really toned down the cultural references and time markers. I didn’t want it to be a book about the 70’s. I thought that would be too easy. I was also trying to avoid the clichés of Southern fiction. I wanted it to feel timeless.

INTERVIEWER

How did you develop narrator Alan Broussard Jr.’s original voice? What was challenging about adapting a perspective as youthful as his?

BISHOP

Limiting myself to Alan’s voice was the big challenge. It took awhile to come to this first person narrator because I kept trying to switch to third person. I settled on the first person narrator because I thought it felt more intimate and realistic. Once I settled on a fourteen-year-old narrator, I worked really hard to find the balance in his voice. I started out trying too hard to write as a fourteen-year-old. Later, the solution I found was to develop a sort of hybrid narrator—an adult looking back and telling the story. We do that when we tell stories about childhood. We use our vocabulary and understanding to explain how we saw things then. It’s a fourteen-year-old’s perceptions with an adult vocabulary.

INTERVIEWER

Alan Broussard Sr. has a pretty advanced knowledge of the cosmos. Was there heavy research involved in informing Alan Sr.’s perspective? Was the research enjoyable?

BISHOP

Oh yes, it was fun. Research is the fun part. Research is what you do when you can’t write.

INTERVIEWER

In the end, do the stars aid young Alan Broussard Jr. in better understanding his family and his own place in the world?

BISHOP

At the end of the novel, when Alan is an adult, he realizes his life is very small compared to the cosmos. But from the kid’s point of view, he can see his family being affected by the comet. Everyone’s going crazy because of the comet. And Alan gets caught up in it too. His parents and the whole town draw him into it. So I think Alan begins to feel like the comet is screwing up their lives completely. He feels that. He’s also a smart kid, though, so he’s resisting.

Erin Little is an intern for New Orleans Review and an English Writing major at Loyola University New Orleans.

Comet ISON Heats Up, Adds New Tail

This update on Comet ISON from Universe Today. Come on, ISON! Come on!

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Comet ISON Heats Up, Grows New Tail
by Bob King, Nov. 7, 2013

I’m starting to get the chills about Comet ISON. I can’t help it. With practically every telescope turned the comet’s way fewer than three short weeks before perihelion, every week brings new images and developments. The latest pictures show a brand new tail feature emerging from the comet’s bulbous coma. For months, amateur and professional astronomers alike have watched ISON’s slowly growing dust tail that now stretches nearly half a degree or a full moon’s diameter. In the past two days, photos taken by amateur astronomers reveal what appears to be a nascent ion or gas tail. Damian Peach’s Nov. 6 image clearly shows two spindly streamers.

Favorite Astronomy Poems No. 4: “Alone and Drinking Under the Moon,” by Li Po

Today’s Favorite Astronomy Poem is the melancholy “Alone and Drinking Under the Moon,” by famed Chinese poet Li Po (or Li Bai). Here’s a picture to put you in the mood:

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(Fishing Boat Anchored on a Moonlit Night, by Bai Jin, 1388-1462)

The poet Li Po was born in 701, perhaps in Gansu province, in China. He spent much of his life wandering up and down China, writing poetry, drinking wine, and visiting friends. He won the favor of the Emperor, and when the Emperor was overthrown, he was exiled and sentenced to death. He eventually received an imperial pardon and resumed wandering. Legend has it that Li Po drowned when he reached from his boat to grasp the moon’s reflection in a river.

Chinese children still learn his poems today in school. This one, “Alone and Drinking Under the Moon,” has been translated many times into English. I like this version, by Rewi Alley

Alone and Drinking Under the Moon
by Li Po (Li Bai), 701-762

Amongst the flowers I
am alone with my pot of wine
drinking by myself; then lifting
my cup I asked the moon
to drink with me, its reflection
and mine in the wine cup, just
the three of us; then I sigh
for the moon cannot drink,
and my shadow goes emptily along
with me never saying a word;
with no other friends here, I can
but use these two for company;
in the time of happiness, I
too must be happy with all
around me; I sit and sing
and it is as if the moon
accompanies me; then if I
dance, it is my shadow that
dances along with me; while
still not drunk, I am glad
to make the moon and my shadow
into friends, but then when
I have drunk too much, we
all part; yet these are
friends I can always count on
these who have no emotion
whatsoever; I hope that one day
we three will meet again,
deep in the Milky Way.

inRegister Magazine Review of Comet

Thanks to Donna Perreault and Baton Rouge’s inRegister magazine for a fine review of The Night of the Comet.

inRegister

The Night of the Comet

By Donna Perreault
Published Oct 31, 2013

The mystery of our parents’ union: Who hasn’t felt its power? It’s the condition for our existence, the prelude to our birth. To an adolescent sorting out issues of identity, how he ended up with his parents can be both fascinating and perplexing. That’s the experience of 14-year-old Alan Broussard Jr. in George Bishop’s great new novel, The Night of the Comet. He puzzles over his parents’ improbable marriage during the year it unravels.

We learn in the prologue that the Broussard family of Terrebonne Parish is heading toward a crisis. Bishop admits, “I’d always envisioned starting the novel with a cliffhanger.” Junior, as he is called, is grown up now and living in Baton Rouge. He finds himself recalling the night in December 1973 when he watched his father climb a water tower with the apparent intention of leaping to his death. Does he do it? Why does he despair? Find out in the ensuing saga, told from “a strange kind of adult-boy point of view hybrid,” Bishop told inRegister. Junior’s voice conveys the “naiveté of youth” leavened with mature insight.

The eponymous comet that sets Junior’s story in motion is Kohoutek, predicted in 1973 to be “the comet of the century.” So says Alan Broussard Sr. to his high school students in the fictional town of Terrebonne. “You’re in for a real treat this year,” he promises at the semester’s start. “Something really special.” Alan Sr. is an Earth and Space Science teacher and a passionate amateur astronomer. In Junior’s eyes he’s awkward and wacky, a source of daily embarrassment. But as Kohoutek barrels earthward, Alan Sr. becomes a local celebrity.

Junior notes this transformation warily, seeing his dad stir up awe and anticipation in everyone—except his wife, Lydia. But the teen has his own passion to tend to: for his new neighbor Gabriella. The comet, he feels, is an agent of change. But to what end? Bishop notes, “Without getting too symbolic about it, the comet heralds Junior’s arrival into adulthood.”

Comet Ison Update

Despite dire predictions to the contrary, recent reports say that Comet ISON is still “doing just fine” and “holding it together.”

I think I’m growing to love this little comet.

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Latest Images of Comet ISON Show it is ‘Doing Just Fine’
Universe Today
October 11, 2013

As we reported yesterday, the latest data on Comet ISON indicates there is some encouraging news as far as the Comet surviving perihelion, its closest approach to the Sun. While some are all doom and gloom about the potential for Comet ISON putting on a good show, these latest images indicate that as of now, this comet is alive and doing well!

“We really do not know what comet ISON is going to do when it gets near the Sun,” wrote astronomer Karl Battams of the Comet ISON Observing Campaign website. “But what we can say for certain, right now, is that comet ISON is doing just fine! It continues to behave like a fairly typical, if somewhat smaller-than-average, Oort Cloud comet. It has given no indication that it has fragmented and while such an event can never be ruled out, we see no evidence or hint that the comet is in any imminent danger of doing so. Any reports to the contrary are just speculation.”

Hubble Confirms Comet ISON Is Holding It Together
Discovery
October 17, 2013

Despite speculation to the contrary, Comet ISON is holding its own against the sun’s heat, with its cometary nucleus apparently remaining as a solid mass.

New observations carried out by the Hubble Space Telescope on Oct. 9 have resolved the interplanetary traveler with a beautifully smooth coma (the dust and gas around the “head” of the comet) with a bright tail swept back.

The comet — which was discovered in September 2012 by the International Scientific Optical Network (ISON), near Kislovodsk, Russia — is believed to be a pristine cometary nucleus that has fallen from the hypothetical Oort Cloud — a reservoir of icy fragments left over from the birth of the solar system. It is reckoned that this “shell” of proto-comets is located around 1 light-year away from the sun.

As this is its first visit to the inner solar system, astronomers theorized that ISON’s nucleus might fragment as it becomes heated by the sun’s energy. Looking at this image, there appears to be no abnormalities in the comet’s coma that would reveal fragmentation.

Interestingly, as noted by a Space Telescope Science Institute news release, a polar jet of dust projecting from ISON’s nucleus seen in Hubble images taken in April is no longer visible and likely turned off.

ISON is due to make its closest pass to the sun on Nov. 28 and, should it survive the fiery encounter, the comet could become an impressive sight in nighttime and daytime skies when it makes closest approach with the Earth on Dec. 26.