Rachel: Channeling Mark Twain is filled multi-layered characters and topics from pimps and prostitution to mental illness and social activism. What made you decide to give the novel that title? Were you trying to direct the reader’s attention to one area of the book?

Carol Muske-Dukes: I couldn’t write this novel for years. I tried it as a long poem (I’m a poet) and as a kind of journalism, but no go. My difficulty in finding its center or nucleus was caused by a conflict I felt in my own life which colored my initial attempts to write this semi-autobiographical novel. The novel is set in a time I remember well. I was teaching poetry at the Women’s House of Detention on Riker’s Island (and in other prisons) during the 70’s (the “present” of Channeling Mark Twain) and I discovered that I could not seem to bring together, in my mind, the world of prison and prison poetry — and the world of the literary life of Manhattan and its traditional aesthetic of poetry. This division of sensibilities, of language, tortured me for years. Finally, I realized that I could write about the conflict itself, what that felt like at the time. And what helped me realize this was a moment of inspiration: I suddenly thought that, along with writing about my own experience, I could invent a character who was a version of Mark Twain’s Huck Finn, contemporized — and I tried to imagine what it would be like if Huckleberry Finn “came back” as a young African American woman in prison on Riker’s Island. Thus, my character, Polly Lyle Clement, is at the center of Channeling Mark Twain. This young woman, a mysterious wayfarer and self-described blood descendant of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, channels him — just as I tried to “channel” her.
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