From meat to potatoes: an interview with Ruth Ozeki

"From meat to potatoes" documents Ruth Ozeki's growth into the award-winning author she has become, from her childhood reading classic literary works in New Haven, to her early years as a film-maker in New York, and until the present as a best-selling novelist. The interview covers Ozeki's views on topics such as racism, the environmental crisis, political activism, questions about reproduction, and the artistic process. Among the many things Ozeki discusses are the challenges she faced in producing her two novels, and answers questions about the challenges that her novels offer. Both of her novels offer substantial challenges to readers. For instance, the notion that authenticity is possible in the 21st century is one of the main challenges of Ozeki's novels, and she explores various notions about hybridity in each, whether it is the hybridity of Jane Tagaki-Little and her mixed heritage in My Year of Meats or the hybridity of transgenic crops in All Over Creation. Also, it is very clear that Ozeki's novels herald an exciting new direction that the genre of the novel itself is taking toward lessening the sense of opposition between science and fiction, toward the blurring of those boundaries. Ozeki's use of footnotes and a bibliography in My Year of Meats places her work both in the world of fiction and in the world of fact so that (like the themes she follows) her own use of the novel genre itself becomes something of a hybrid. Transcribed here is the edited version of part of that interview held on June 5, 2009, at Canada's University of Victoria.