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You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed.

Or you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read. Hello and welcome to

Bookworm. Today my guest is Whitney Otto. Her most recent book is The Passion Dream Book, a novel

published by Harper Collins. She's the author as well of Now You See Her and How to Make an American Quilt. I'm Michael Silverblatt.

Whitney has been on the show with each of the books, so by now we're used to talking to one

another, and I noticed, how to put it, Whitney's books, Whitney Otto's books, are more like

one another than they are like anything else.

And I wondered if you can describe what goes into a novel by Whitney Otto.

I think that I rely a lot on a form of collage, and it's collage of image and images,

obviously, through words. And my books tend to be a lot of sort of found objects assembled and reassembled and torn apart and reassembled

until they sort of represent or look like only themselves.

And I don't know, I think, about the collage art at the beginning of the 20th century in Western art.

And I really love that kind of art, and I think that there's something that must work on me subconsciously in my own work.

I particularly think of Joseph Cornell's boxes.

Yes.

That he collects things that he loves, that he puts them into

juxtaposition with one another, and in the course of handling and handling the same kind of images,

as a result, there's almost a spirituality, a spiritual mystery about the Cornell box, which I sense is also there in your novels.

In order to do the things you want, you rely on ideas like the transmigration of souls

...