Proust/Shirk

This week Adrian Shirk confesses everything to the document as part of our ongoing Proust Questionnaire project. See for yourself,

Meet Adrian Shirk

Adrian Shirk is a founding member of, and fiction editor for, The Corresponding Society. In the past her prose has appeared in Broad, Slouch, Look-Look, and Spork Magazine, as well as previous volumes of Correspondence. Her work is also available as an audiobook, Stories w/Snacks, which she recorded with a Portland, Oregon musician in 2008. She maintains a literary food blog, at What I Ate Where, and is currently enrolled in the Writing Program at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.

Adrian Shirk Answers the Proust Questionnaire

Your favorite virtue.
Fortitude [faith].

Your favorite qualities in a man.
Memory, quickness, surrender.

Your favorite qualities in a woman.
Verve, intuition, camaraderie.

Your chief characteristic.
Conscientiousness.

What you appreciate the most in your friends.
Willingness, late nights, long rides.

Your main fault.
Defeat.

Your favorite occupation.
Story telling.

Your idea of happiness.
A tall chair on a wide front porch with a bucket of cathead oysters, pen and paper.

Your idea of misery.
Psychosis.

If not yourself, who would you be?
Jenny Lewis.

Where would you like to live?
Pittsburgh. Savannah. Silver City, New Mexico.

Your favorite prose authors.
Flannery O’Connor, Richard Brautigan, Shirley Jackson, Raymond Carver, JD Salinger, Ian Frazier, MFK Fisher, C.S. Lewis, Sharon Creech, Tennessee Williams, Checkov.

Your favorite poets.
Robert Creeley, Theodore Roethke, Sylvia Plath, Frank O’Hara, Elizabeth Bishop, Sappho.

Your favorite heroes in fiction.
The Glass family.

Your favorite heroines in fiction.
Salamanca Tree Hiddle.

Your favorite painters and composers.
Edward Hopper, Andrew Wyeth, Francis Bacon, Gershwin, Debussy.

Your heroes in “real life.”
My mother’s parents, honey bees, the guy who drives the night soil cart.

What characters in history do you most dislike?
Ted Hughes.

Your favorite names.
Mae, June, Ramona, Kate, Field, Milo, Julius, the names of the United States.

What do you hate the most?
Waste.

What military event do you admire the most?
Little Big Horn.

What reform do you admire the most?
The Bacchae.

The natural talent you’d like to be gifted with.
Ease.

How do you wish to die?
Tall chair, wide porch, oysters, pen, paper &c. And old.

What is your present state of mind?
Rhizomatic.

For what fault do you have the most toleration?
Self-destruction.

Your favorite motto.
When in Rome do as in Midgeville.