Joshua Cohen on Absorbing and Assimilating Events | The New Yorker
Cressida Leyshon interviews the writer Joshua Cohen about “My Camp,” his story from the October 21, 2024, issue of The New Yorker. This week’s story, “My Camp,” opens with its narrator, a writer, searching for a holiday house in the depths of the New Jersey countryside, an activity he describes as a compulsion or an addiction. Why did you choose New Jersey?As a reader, I have no concept of “too soon.” As a writer, “too soon” is more of a psychological-technical issue: a matter of not having had enough time to absorb and assimilate events, to find the character and voice, the form and frame. I started writing an early version of “My Camp” last winter, with the same qualms I usually have (Why do this?As for it being offensive: I myself have never been offended by literature, and that includes all the “kike” this and “yid” that of my beloved Céline and Dostoyevsky. Did you have the title in mind from the outset? If so, how important was it in determining the structure of the story? If not, when did the title come to you? “What camp are you in?” I’m asked variations of this question constantly, and I always think, My camp, I’m in my camp.Early on, the narrator refers to the summer of 2023 as the last sane season—“a golden age, at least a silver age”—and, after a long account of a tour of an abandoned summer camp, the narrator describes the attacks of October 7th in Israel by Palestinian militants from Gaza.