Joyce Carol Oates has been hailed by John Updike as ‘one of America’s most prominent women of letters’. One of modern literature’s most prolific novelists, she has turned out thirty-six novels in thirty-four years, as well as numerous short story collections, essays on literature and boxing, and has edited many anthologies. Even at 60, when most people might consider slowing down, Oates still has numerous novels awaiting publication, is working on a new one chronicling the life of Marilyn Monroe, and still teaches creative writing at Princeton University.

In a rare UK appearance Oates was here recently to promote Virago’s new editions of her novel Man Crazy and modern classic paperbacks of the earlier books Solstice and Expensive People.

In many ways Man Crazy is vintage Oates material. It tells the story of Ingrid Boone and her life in northern New York State. Her family would be described as poor white trash, trying to eke out an existence without settling in one place long enough to establish any roots. Ingrid is hauled from town to town by her mother, a woman who can’t support herself except by leeching on men who are out for what her body can give them. Ingrid’s father is mostly absent, a burnt-out Vietnam Vet on the run from the authorities. The book chronicles Ingrid’s life on the move and into adolescence, and eventually into the arms of a crazed gang of Hell’s Angels. There she is sexually abused, drugged, tortured and made to drink the blood of a murdered man. It’s grim, but as Oates says, ‘Hell’s Angels are very dangerous and very real. I couldn’t have a soft narrative about these people. I had to be true to the subject matter’. At the same time the book has a redemptive conclusion, something notably absent in many of her other ‘realistic’ narratives, such as the hugely successful novella Black Water and the awesome novel What I Lived For.

What I Lived For tells the story of shady businessman Jerome ‘Corky’ Corcoran and the events in which he becomes embroiled over one Labour Day weekend. It is a staggering portrayal of the male psyche and I asked Oates what kind of research she had done in order to achieve such a powerfully realised character.

‘I did some research for it but the character is someone I really know very well. He’s fictional but he’s based on people in my family who are part-Irish, and certain of their male sensibilities. Corky Corcoran is the type of man who was one of the first subscribers to Playboy. He’s very macho and we would say he has an average male sensibility. He’s not intellectual. He’s canny and shrewd and intelligent, but he’s not intellectual. He reads science, he’s always trying to improve his mind like a lot of American men feel they have to do, and, as I say, he’s the kind of man who would read Playboy without irony. Part of the novel was excerpted in Playboy so I feel kind of vindicated. Corky has all these sexual adventures and they are all sort of comic and they all sort of go wrong. Yet he’s so idealistic he still thinks of himself as very macho. I really love Corky myself and when I was interviewed by a feminist magazine the interviewer looked at me and said with disgust, "How could you write about that male chauvinist pig?". I was so hurt, I really felt that I loved him like an Uncle. So the novel is very close to my heart but it was a difficult book to write because it is so intricately plotted.’

One of the most remarkable things about Oates’s talent is her ability to write across all genres and experiment with different forms of literature. Which does she actually prefer?

‘Whatever I’m currently working on. I teach creative writing at Princeton University and I always encourage young writers to begin with short stories and this will help them fill their narratives out into a novel. I know James Joyce’s Dubliners is not a novel but it has the feel of a novel, it has a kind of solidity to it. There’s no story called ‘Dubliners’ in it so in a way it’s like an experimental novel where each of the stories Joyce wrote when he was very young add up to a vision of a city, so it has a novel-like structure. Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg Ohio is also a novel based around self-contained short stories.

‘I like to experiment with all kinds of form, so I have novellas like Black Water and First Love which are really quite short. These are not only shorter, they’re easier to write. They’re easier emotionally and psychologically and when you’re trying to write you have to be very careful of your own psyche because it can be very disruptive. You can be very unhappy and nervous when you’re writing. You can also be very anxious, but this can be a sign that the writing is important. But if you’re too anxious and you can’t sleep, which has happened to lots of writers, then that can be too disruptive. I try to lead my young writer students to a way of writing where they’re getting a good stimulus from the unconscious so the writing is exciting to them but they’re not anxious, or they’re not actually getting nightmares. I think any kind of writing that’s too bland, too easy, is not going to be worthwhile, but it can be like playing with fire.’

Oates is known as a hugely prolific writer. Often she will release one novel a year, and a collection of short stories, and occasionally throw a pseudonymous novel into the mix too. So how does she do it? When does she sleep, or teach, or do anything else, given her massive output?

‘Well, I don’t seem very prolific to myself. It seems like I’m always revising. I write fairly slowly, I write a paragraph then I look at it and write it over again. I would really like to write a whole manuscript and then revise it but I don’t seem able to do that.

‘I spend a lot of time daydreaming and thinking, and trying to get the structure of the work like a movie in my head. So, I’m working on a novel now and I know it’s about 600 pages long. I’m trying to dream it out and see the whole thing, all the scenes. You can see you’re at, say, chapter 11 and you work through to the very end and then you have your final scene and you see it somehow, inside your head, then when you start writing you are really starting to remember the movie in your head. At least, that has worked for me for a long time.

‘And something people don’t seem to really believe is that I basically love writing. A lot of what is in Man Crazy is about my girlhood. Ingrid’s father flies a small plane as my father did, and the book contains some of the romance of being a young girl, and especially a young girl surrounded by older men, and these things to me seem very poetic and lyric, and I really love writing those things very much.’

Have any of her books actually been filmed?

‘A few. There was one called Lies of the Twins, with Isabella Rossellini, on TV here recently. The title of the book was Lives of the Twins but the "v" got lost along the way somewhere. I didn’t have anything to do with that, and I’ve only seen about fifteen minutes of the film, it’s just so painful. It’s, shall we say, a typical Hollywoodisation of the novel, it’s not recognisable as the original work. And then there was a movie of a novel called Foxfire. It had some interesting actors and actresses in it. It was well directed, but it didn’t quite work. Foxfire is set in the 1950s but they had such a small budget for the film they had to set it in the 1990s because they couldn’t afford to get old cars. The most successful adaptation is a film called Smooth Talk which has been around for a while now; it won some awards and Laura Dern made her acting debut in it.’

Under the name Rosamond Smith, Oates has released five novels. I like many of them, but they are distinctly different to Oates’s ‘own’ books. Does she take chances with the Rosamond Smith books that she would not take with those released under her own name?

‘Those books tend to be more cinematic than the Oates books. They lend themselves to film more easily and so they perhaps don’t fit the Oates canon too well. Lives of the Twins was published as Kindred Passions in this country. I don’t know why they wanted to change the title. Lives of the Twins, with its evocation of lives of the poets, was what I wanted, but somehow over here they thought Kindred Passions would sell more copies, which I think was a mistaken judgement.

‘There was another novel called Nemesis published in England and I remember looking at the dust jacket and just being completely astonished why anyone would choose this jacket cover. It showed one dead canary and another canary, and the dead one was lying on its back and I said really very respectfully, "Who do you think is going to buy this book?". And it seems to have been a prescient question because I don’t think anyone did buy the book.’

Does she think the pseudonym a mistake then?

‘Certainly I was upset when it was discovered. But many of our mistakes only seem so in retrospect. At the time it seemed like an exciting idea. But what happens in the world today is that we don’t have the anonymity that Jonathan Swift had, or Voltaire, who I think had a hundred pseudonyms. Anyway, there are certain things like copyright, or registers at the library of congress, and that is how I must have been found out. My name doesn’t appear on the copyright, but there are ways to find out who someone is if you are determined. Stephen King had a pseudonym and he was discovered through copyright. So really what I guess this adds up to is that it seemed like a good idea, but I didn’t foresee how I could have been discovered, and so people have concluded it was a mistake.’

One of Oates’s most commercially successful and controversial books has been the novella Black Water. It fictionalises the infamous drowning of a young girl at Chappaquiddick and Senator Kennedy’s escape, and is viewed from the girl’s perspective. It is a very powerful piece of work and I wondered if it had been as intense to write as it was to read.

‘It certainly was a very intense novel to write. I would write 40 pages and distil it down to, say, 20 pages because I wanted it to be compact, like poetry.

‘The book is deliberately written in two parts. The first part only lasts five minutes in real time and the girl and the senator are in this car that goes off the road and into the black water, and the senator frees himself, he swims away, but the girl is trapped. The text is really very lucid and fast moving, and so the language has a daylight, starchy feel to it. The second part tells of the girl’s gradual death and how she is thinking of her life. She is having more hallucinatory experiences as her oxygen levels fall in the pocket of air and so the sentences break down. They become very long, they’re kind of sinuous and reflect the growing confusion of the girl as she gradually, and finally, dies.

‘So to me it was an experimental book that tries to give the reader a sense of the disintegration of language. It was an intense book to write, and an intense experience.’

Perhaps Oates’s most celebrated achievement in fiction is in the ‘Gothic series’ of novels. So far four of the completed five books have been published, the most recent being My Heart Laid Bare, released in the United States earlier this year. Why has she been so extensively drawn to gothic fiction?

‘Well, I’ve always loved writers like Poe and I read Stoker when I was about twelve which probably warped me forever. I think that when I started reading Lewis Carroll at 6 or 7, a part of me realised that Alice’s adventures, which are surreal and really quite nightmarish, were something which celebrated the power of the human imagination. Carroll would not be considered a gothic writer but his vision informed me that it’s the elevation of the imagination over everything else, over rationality or common sense, the idea that the imagination of mankind is just enormous and powerful, and that is what great gothic writing celebrates. I have a real affinity with that way of using the imagination and so it has come into my fiction extensively.

‘Realistic fiction is a different kind of project, a different strategy if you like. The whole idea of a realistic novel is to give it a world that is like a mirror and you should be able to trust the world that is presented to you. But the gothic sort of spins off from that real world.’

Oates, one of our most precious literary treasures, has said that the creative process is, at its core, unknowable. She simply does what she is driven to do by her creative instinct: ‘The gothic and the realistic modes are very different, but speaking as a reader and a writer I think we need them both in our lives’.