Writing as an Act of Faith: A Conversation with Nicolette Polek about "Bitter Water Opera"

Diana Ruzova

April 30

In Nicolette Polek's debut novel Bitter Water Opera a young film professor named Gia is in the midst of a crisis. She has left her job and her boyfriend and is in a fit of despair ignoring phone calls from her mother and sleeping 15 hours a day. In the opening pages of this slim imaginative novel, Gia is visited by the ghost of Marta Becket—the eccentric ballerina and owner of the Amargosa Opera House and Hotel in Death Valley, California. Gia forms a quiet, yet intimate friendship with Becket and ultimately finds a spiritual solution out of her despair via a religious congregation, gardening, and a road trip in a rented white convertible to Becket's desert oasis.

Polek and I connected over email to discuss what first drew her to Marta Becket, how she crafts her richly detailed cinematic sentences, and whether or not she believes writing is an act of faith.

Diana Ruzova

I'm curious what first drew you to Marta Becket and the Amargosa Opera House and Hotel? Did you always know you were going to write a novel with Marta in it?

Nicolette Polek

I found Marta through a database of obscure landmarks. I was initially struck by photographs of the murals she painted within her opera house, but then encountered a comment on the message board expressing discomfort with Marta—primarily with seeing an elderly body dancing ballet. I felt defensive on her behalf! Which slowly became an obsession with her project. After reading her autobiography, I thought I would write an experimental biography in the tradition of Fleur Jaeggy's These Possible Lives, but quickly found that I would get stuck at the nature and effects of her isolation, which I could more easily approach from the vantage point of an external, fictional character.

Diana Ruzova

What did your research process look like? Did you stay at the hotel? Did you have access to the archives? How much of the content in the book is based on factual research?

Nicolette Polek

I stayed at Amargosa halfway into the writing of the book and met/corresponded with people who knew her quite well. It was a year into the pandemic and I felt like a ghost there, which can be a fruitful way to be. It was very quiet and I felt, oddly, nervous of what I would find. Fred Conboy, the president of the opera house board, was very generous with his time and his stories. Her autobiography, To Dance on Sands, was a crucial text for me. Most of the direct quotations spoken by Marta in Bitter Water Opera are her own words. But of course the fictional context renders it as new information, so I hesitate to make the claim that any of it is factual.

Diana Ruzova

Gia, the narrator of Bitter Water Opera reminds me of other female narrators in recent popular fiction, like Jen Beagin's Big Swiss and Ottessa Moshfegh's My Year of Rest and Relaxation. They are all lost and in despair, sleeping their lives away. But your work differs in structure and use of language, and of course resolution. Why do you think it's important to write about a woman in despair?

Nicolette Polek

Despair, as I've known it—the sharp nothingness that forgets all light, time, love, and will—is hell. I wanted to not only take that seriously but present one very particular possibility of someone lifted from it. I see the grips of despair and despondency as an ever-present threat, increasingly present due to secularism's formation of the rootless, yet buffered, individual.

Diana Ruzova

I love your sentences! They are so cinematic and rich with detail. I particularly loved the line, "The beetle made thin, metallic sounds. It sounded like it was singing "Ave Maria."" How do you go about crafting your sentences?

Nicolette Polek

Viktor Shklovky's defamiliarization is under a lot of my sentences, making the familiar strange again through misfit details, contradictory and misaligned emotions. When I really began writing fiction, as an undergrad who was also studying the piano, I was reading Joy Williams and Herta Müller, and playing a lot of the Romantics—Chopin, Schumann, Liszt, Brahms—who employed a wide range of both dynamics and tone. It's a musical sensibility that thrives in deep contrasts, so perhaps that creeps up.

Diana Ruzova

You recently completed a Masters of Arts in Religion from Yale Divinity School. How did your religious education influence the plot of Bitter Water Opera?

Nicolette Polek

I had the bulk of the book finished before getting to Yale. My (at the time very recently discovered) love for God influenced the plot of Bitter Water Opera, and how I've seen God work in my family and friends' lives. Religious education has maybe given me an intellectual community and a context to think about these things—I read a lot of Eastern Orthodox thinkers, played the organ and more deeply understood Bach's devotion and how it appears in his compositions, saw how Gerard Manley Hopkins and George Herbert's lives as priests were brought into tension with their poetry. All this helped me see how my faith touches everything I do, if I'm doing it from the heart.

Diana Ruzova

Is writing an act of faith?

Nicolette Polek

There's a common misunderstanding that faith means to believe in something that doesn't have substantial evidence. I like when Paul Tillich describes faith as an "ultimate act of being concerned," and "the act in which reason reaches ecstatically beyond itself." We all have faith in something. Writing, for me, is a formally directed embodiment of it.

Diana Ruzova

What was the last thing you read that floored you?

Nicolette Polek

From the last few weeks: Adalbert Stifter's Rock Crystal, The Life of St. Mary of Egypt, Louisa May Alcott's essays. In springtime, I feel like I can be floored by so much.

Diana Ruzova

What's next? Are you working on any new projects?

Nicolette Polek

Many! My father-in-law likes to say "You've got to make hay while the sun shines," and I have a brief window of quiet, uninterrupted time, which I'm trying to fill with as much writing as possible. In the fall, I'll be teaching at Bennington College, and hopefully finishing up a few manuscripts.