DS: Daguerreotypes are, by nature, otherworldly. With millions of drops of mercury in each image, they have a metallic sheen that is like a hologram. There's a ghostly shimmer burned into each plate. I wanted the language to capture some of this. For example, a lot of my language is necessarily about the interplay between light and dark -- dusk, night, shadows, half-light, etc. I also used apocalyptic imagery (hangdog, underwater, drowned) because of the nature of Daguerre's delusion. But early portraits -- which required people to sit still for up to an hour -- also have a weird and haunting formality to them. It's easy to believe these people existed in some kind of limbo. All of this played into my choices for language.
AC: Do you think studying photography in general was a good practice for your fiction?
DS: Absolutely. I've been an amateur photographer since high school and it's a nice complement to writing because it's very hands on. With a camera you're looking for ways to capture the essence of something but also wondering how to make your own statement about it.
AC: As a poet, I also have to ask how poetry, in addition to the novels of the time, influenced your writing of the book, since poets, especially Baudelaire, play such a role in the novel.
DS: I did read a lot of poetry from the time -- all of Baudelaire's and much of his English contemporaries. Poetry is a great window into a world...it gives you emotions and preoccupations in a very particular way. It also gives you great sensory detail. I would often begin my writing day by reading poetry from this time...just to get a sense of word play and rhythm.
AC: Michael Adams [a fiction writer and University of Texas professor] used to say that place is always the most important aspect of fiction writing -- that you have to start with that or your story and your characters will never ring true. The city of Paris is practically a character in your book. Did living in Europe help you to evoke Paris, or is the Paris of your novel so much of the past that it could have been written through library research alone, through travel writings, newspaper articles, etc?
DS: Having spent time in Paris certainly helped -- it gave me a sense of the city's layout and the range of neighborhoods and the distances between things. But the historical Paris I created is a strange amalgam of details gathered from maps, pamphlets, travel diaries, articles, etc. I tried to stay true to what has been documented, but in the end there is the warping of time and the imagination. The world you create has to be dynamic and fit the mood of your piece. In my book, Paris is also slanted through Daguerre's apocalyptic visions. Since he is struck with both nostalgia and doom, it's natural for him to notice paper bunting and lanterns but also the catacombs and the barrens behind the left bank.
