Marilyn Sward: When did you first become aware that there was such a thing as hand papermaking? Audrey Niffenegger: Oh gosh. When I was a freshman in high school in Chicago, I made a friend whose name is Becky Heydemann. Becky took me to Aiko's Art Materials. The store was beyond my imagining. I remember I bought four or five sheets of Japanese paper that first day and I still have most of them because I could never bear to cut them \[laughs\]. At that point, I think I had this idea that hand papermaking was this exotic thing mostly done in Japan but I was aware very early on that there was such a thing, and Becky, interestingly enough, is now someone who makes paper herself. And when did you first make your own sheet of paper? That's a good question. I think it might have been with you \[laughs\]. Certainly I did papermaking here and there, but as you know, I'm not really a papermaker. I never got serious about it. That's such a shame. \[Both laugh.\] I just have so many things to do. There's got to be something other people can do, you know \[laughs\]? And how did Clare happen to become a sculptural papermaker in The Time Traveler's Wife? Of all the things you can do with paper, that to me seems the most intriguing and unexpected. I didn't see her as a production papermaker…so frequently production paper is at the service of some other medium like printing or painting. I really wanted her to be doing things that were big, for one thing. Why is that? The Time Traveler's Wife: An Interview with Audrey Niffenegger marylin sward ms an ms an ms an ms The next morning it's raining…I turn on the radio; it's Chopin, rolling etudes like waves over sand. I don rubber boots, a bandanna to keep my hair out of the pulp, a rubber apron. I hose down my favorite teak and brass mold and deckle, uncover the vat, set up a felt to couch the paper onto. I reach down into the vat and agitate the slurry of dark red to mix the fiber and water. Everything drips…I plunge the mold and deckle down, bring it up, drain it, couch it. I lose myself in the repetition, the piano music floating over the water sloshing and dripping and raining. When I have a post of paper and felt, I press it in the hydraulic paper press. Then I go back to the house and eat a ham sandwich. Henry is reading. Excerpt from The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger. Copyright © 2003. Used by permission of MacAdam/Cage Publishing. The author Audrey Niffenegger at the Chicago Center for the Book and Paper Arts. Photo: Dennis Hearne. Courtesy of MacAdam/Cage Publishing, San Francisco. winter 2005 - 49 I think part of it was just the idea that she is a female artist and I wanted her to be doing something that was fairly serious. In my own artwork I do these tiny things and I would say I'm serious, but there is a general bias that you are not a serious artist unless you make large-scale work. Clare is frequently a passive character in the book, but in the realm of her art, I wanted her to be in charge. I agree that to the average person, large often convey serious. I know, isn't that sad? I hardly ever make anything large. Basically I never make anything that couldn't fit in my car. Right. In fact, at this point, I don't make anything that I can't put in a shopping bag, but in terms of Clare, I wanted her to take up space, you know? When I read Clare's very explicit description of papermaking, I wondered if you had somebody read that section of the book to see if it were right. Yes, Stacey Stern \[currently Studio Coordinator of Columbia's Center for Book and Paper Arts\] read it over for me. I did feel pretty paranoid about this because I thought, whoa, what if I publish this and it is inaccurate? My editors certainly weren't going to be able to correct those technical details. Let's see…I am looking at the description of Clare's papermaking on page 482 \[in the First Harvest paperback edition 2004\]… Found it. Well, it's amazing how much you can learn about something by osmosis. I've never studied hand papermaking in-depth. I just hang out with people who do it. I'm in the paper studio a lot. Of course we, as papermakers, think it's fabulous that Clare has risen to such popularity, taking our craft along with her. Well, it's interesting because occasionally people say, "Uhhh, what's all this about papermaking? This is tedious and we don't want to know all about that." And other people say, "I loved it! I'm gonna take a papermaking class now." Readers represent the whole spectrum from people who don't care one way or another to people who are violently annoyed by it to people who decide to go out and find out more about it. I feel like I have had some kind of impact. Absolutely! Papermaking has an expanded audience due to your book. It's amazing! Now I've got a general question about Clare – do you miss her? Yes, I do. The funny thing is that I thought I was differentiating Clare from me by making her a papermaker and not a printer. Printing is mostly what I do in my artwork. To me, those are radically different things, but most people can't distinguish these two professions. People think I'm a papermaker and they're kind of disappointed when I say, "No, I do this other thing which I didn't bother to tell you about." I've known you Audrey throughout the development of your career as a visual artist, which is considerable. You are well known in Chicago for your artwork, but now with your international prominence as the author of The Time Traveler's Wife, I have been wondering if there is some kind of visual art form which could take on this magnitude? I really can't think of one, but have you thought about this at all? This has really been an interesting education in the differences between the visual arts field and the literary field. Just even considering the question of distribution – I have had a number of different galleries over the years, but my main gallery has always been Printworks in Chicago. They are a wonderful gallery, quite visible and well known, and they have been around for 25 years, but they are just one place. It's one physical location and I made a lot of things that exist either as unique objects or in editions of, say, ten. In contrast, you've got a Borders and a Barnes and Noble on practically every street corner. At this point, I think there is something like 2 million copies of my book in print and it will eventually be available in 30 different countries. So just purely in terms of distribution, I really don't see how the visual arts can compete. Certainly there are visual artists today who are extremely well known, for example, Jasper Johns. But when was the last time you took a Jasper Johns home and got to look at it in your living room? You can buy a paperback book for $12 or $14 and take it with you on the plane or wherever you are going. Portability is one of the things I have always loved about the book form. When art is cheap and democratic, then everyone can have it. The same goes for the music field. The visual arts operate at this huge handicap in terms of bringing creative work to lots of people. The solution to me seems to be "art books." The Three Incestuous Sisters \[originally published in 1999 as a limited edition artist book\] is about to be published by Abrams in the fall of 2005. I've been working to have this happen for years. I started this project in 1985 and have been trying since the mid-1990s to find a way to make a trade edition of the art book. And finally, because of The Time Traveler's Wife, Abrams said, "Sure, we'd love to do it." And when my agent told me that he had nailed down this deal, I started yelling with excitement. He said, "My God, I think you're happier about this than you were about the novel." And I told him, "Well, this just seemed like a bigger miracle." And it really is because Sisters is a strange, obscure piece with no genre. To come back to The Time Traveler's Wife, I understand that a movie is being adapted from your book. Will we see Clare making paper and her paper sculpture on the big screen? I'm afraid I don't know yet. Gus Van Sant is directing and is rewriting the screenplay: it's up to him now. Stay tuned… an the time traveler's wife By Audrey Niffenegger. Copyright © 2003 by Audrey Niffenegger. Available in hardcover, $25 (MacAdam/ Cage); paperback, $14 (Harcourt).