Susan Stinson has just published a new novel, entitled 'Venus of Chalk'. It's partly the story of a woman named Carline who takes a long trip down to Texas to visit an aunt, but of course it's also much more than that. Fusing ideas around the lesbian body, identity, belonging, displacement, love and loss, Stinson has created an entirely believable fictional world. Read on to find out more.

In one sentence can you say what 'Venus of Chalk' is about?
It's the story of an awakening muse.

Carline = Susan?
When I told a friend of mine that some people confuse me with the character of Carline, he got a stunned look on his face, and said, "Well, for one thing, you're obviously NOT a neat freak."

Carline is not me. I made her out of language, sensory memory, and the imperatives of the novel, of story. She reminds me of some of my most beloved friends who are sometimes a bit rigid or bossy, but who are also fabulously brave, smart and adventurous in ways that get overlooked. Of course I used parts of myself to write her, but I did that for Mel, Tucker and Frankie, too. I didn't necessarily give Carline my flaws and vices, but drew on the feelings I've had in parallel situations to give her emotional accuracy. I love her wildly.

Venus of Chalk was some time in the writing, what took you so long to get it out into the world?
Ah, well, I took my time. Part of that was perfectionism: I wanted to feel happy with every aspect of the book, and I do. In its earliest, most rudimentary form, it started with a version of the scene where Tucker takes a picture of Carline without her permission, but it happened under very different circumstances: in an earlier decade, in a cemetery rather than a swimming pool, between characters who had much less of a relationship with each other. The essential tension was the same, though.

I revised over and over and over. There are big hunks of beautiful writing which didn't work with the shape that the book ultimately took. I was meticulous and ruthless.

Then there was the travel. I made several versions of the trip from New England to Texas that Carline, Tucker and Mel take in the book. Once I went by train from Massachusetts to Dallas. Both a friend and also my brother, Don Stinson, drove me over the sections of the route that the bus takes in the book so that I could get the details right. Don is an artist and brought his camera, so I have many of the pictures that Tucker takes in the book (I took some of them myself). I was also travelling to read from my earlier books during much of this period, and every time I got on a bus (I don't have a car), I'd start taking notes.

I've often heard you talk about your love for fiction, what's at the heart of its appeal?
I love the sensuality and discipline of it more than I can say. There's nothing like the satisfaction of making a well-shaped thing.

I love that it's what Flannery O'Connor called an "incarnational art" – that it draws so insistently on the experiences of the body rather than on ideology. I love that it demands both radical honesty and really good lies.

Why do you write about the lives and loves of fat lesbians?
I started doing that because I had never seen fat lesbians as central characters in novels, and that seemed like a foolish omission to me. It was if my culture as reflected in its literature was refusing fat lesbians our full humanity as complex people with gorgeous, interesting lives worthy of the sustained attention that art takes. Fat people's flesh is often treated as a metaphor in daily life; our physical selves are taken to represent laziness, ugliness, greed, lack of will power or deep psychological problems. Those distortions create a well-stocked pool of imagery, reactions and experiences to play with in telling stories of fat bodies in other ways.

What's next for you?
I'm so excited. I'm writing a novel based on the life and family of the eighteenth century theologian and preacher, Jonathan Edwards, who is most famous for his sermon, "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God." Trying to trace some of the sources for contemporary U.S. attitudes towards the body led me to him, as well as the fact that he preached for many years in Northampton, Massachusetts, where I live. He's full of arrogance and judgement, but a terrific writer that makes goose bumps stand up on my skin, and the struggles within his congregation has such a great subtext for me in struggles in lesbian and queer communities I've known, including Northampton, the same geographic community where he lived. It's scary but thrilling to write.

Susan Stinson