Maxine Swann (Photo: Marisela La Grave)

“It’s been a long week,” explains Maxine Swann, sitting down with a glass of white wine. And coming from a woman who’s launching her third book in only a few days, that’s not hard to believe.

As a writing coach, contributor of The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Huffington Post, and an award-winning author of the novels ‘Serious Girls’ and ‘Flower Children’, her writing has received literary recognition in the form of a Ploughshares’ Cohen Award, an O. Henry Award, a Pushcart Prize, and was also selected to appear in the 1998 and 2006 collections of ‘Best American Short Stories’.

Originally from the rural state of Pennsylvania, Maxine lived in New York, Paris and Pakistan before arriving in Buenos Aires, but something about migration to faraway places obviously agrees with her. For this edition of BA Lives, The Indy caught up with her to talk about her not-so-recent relocation and the theme of migration in her new book ‘The Foreigners’.

You’ve lived in Buenos Aires for almost ten years now, how did you come to settle here?

Well, I arrived in Buenos Aires in 2001 with the intention of staying for a few months, and, now that I say this, I realise there’s a pattern here. I arrived in Paris in 1991 to study for a semester and stayed for seven years. I arrived in Pakistan in 1998 with the idea of staying for a month and stayed for over a year. But I’ve never stayed anywhere as long as I’ve stayed in Buenos Aires. I feel like it suits me. I’m happy here – relaxed and playful, and inventive in a new way. Who knows why it happens, but I do feel like certain tendencies I have towards solitude, or being overly reserved, are corrected here.

Can you tell me a little about your latest book ‘The Foreigners’?

Yes, of course. I started writing ‘The Foreigners’ without knowing what the book would be about. I just knew I wanted to capture Buenos Aires, so I began with descriptions of the streets of Chacarita, that kind of thing. I wanted to capture certain feelings the place had given me- of freedom, happiness, loneliness. Of course, I’m also a foreigner here, so my Buenos Aires is a foreigner’s Buenos Aires; which is the other thing I wanted to write about – what it means and how it feels to be a foreigner. So I chose my characters based on that. They each have a different experience of “foreignness”, that I’ve either experienced myself or observed in others.

What interests you about the theme?

I think the interaction between a living creature and its environment  is really fascinating - the intensity of that relationship. There’s a metaphor running throughout the book comparing foreigners to invasive plant species. Some plant species, when placed in a foreign environment, simply wither straight away. There’s too much moisture in the air, or too little, or not enough minerals in the soil, or too much iron, who knows. I’ve spent a lot of time living abroad and, in my experience, the same thing happens with foreigners. Some are immediately diminished by their new surroundings, while others flourish in entirely unexpected ways – sometimes beautifully and sometimes frighteningly – growing rampantly, choking other species, blocking their light, that kind of thing. I think sometimes foreigners feel free to act with a kind of impunity, where the codes are all unfamiliar and their own identities in the new place are suddenly hazy. There’s a chain of events in my book that also has to do with that.

The book cover of 'The Foreigners' by Maxine Swann (Photo courtesy of Maxine Swann)

Your previous books ‘Serious Girls’ and ‘Flower Children’ have both been based on your own upbringing and adolescence. Did writing about adult characters in this book feel like a natural progression?

Yes, I think so. I did suddenly find myself fascinated by adulthood. That said, this book is much less autobiographical than my other books. Part of the evolution also had to do with that, feeling freer to invent, and create rather than reflect the world, even if the reflection was always substantially deformed. I often think that when we write fiction we write our dream version of the world, everything switched around, several people conflated into one – your uncle becomes the dog on the corner  - that kind of thing. Here I think I stepped even further away, which is maybe why writing this book was so enjoyable.

As a foreigner yourself, there’s perhaps an assumption this book is at least tangentially autobiographical. To what extent are the characters in the book based on yourself or your own experiences as a foreigner in Buenos Aires?

There are definitely some parallels in the book with my own experiences – the loneliness that the Austrian woman feels, and the moments of delirious freedom that the American woman does.

All three of your novels, ‘Serious Girls’ in 2003, ‘Flower Children’ in 2005 and now ‘The Foreigners’ in 2011, have been completed since moving to Argentina. How do you find the creative climate in Buenos Aires compared to other places you’ve lived?

I think there’s more space here to be experimental than in the United States. There, literature seems to be increasingly at the mercy of the marketplace – meaning everyone’s main concern is how many books you sell. Not only editors, but writers too – because the amount of books you sell determines the value of your next book contract. So, needless to say, it’s not an environment that encourages audacity. Here, probably because there’s nearly no money involved, the criteria are different. I feel for writers here from a financial perspective, but on the other hand, I find it very refreshing.

You also run two writing workshops each year. Tell me a little about the workshops and what motivates you to teach?

I’ve been directing writing workshops for a while, in different settings. I think teaching is a perfect antidote to writing. I enjoy helping people figure out how to express what they’re trying to express. Having spent so much time struggling with that myself, I also think it makes sense to pass along whatever knowledge I’ve come up with. Also, writing is so solitary. I like trying to find ways to make it more social. I still hope to find a way to write a collaborative novel – it’s one of my cherished future projects!

And finally, with three books already under your belt, what’s next?

At the moment I’m writing a new novel that takes place in Pakistan. It’s a book that’s been germinating in my mind for years so it’s great to finally have it on the table.

Copies of Maxine Swann’s ‘The Foreigners’ will be on sale at the public launch party where Maxine will be joined by special guests discussing the book. Readers of The Argentina Independent are invited to attend at 7.30pm, Costa Rica 5824, Palermo Hollywood, Buenos Aires.