Pointless Joy: An Interview with Bette Adriaanse

Misha Grifka Wander Bette Adriaanse, also known as Bette A., is a Dutch writer and visual artist. Her book What Art Does was written with Brian Eno about the expansive nature of art and creation. Her new short story collection, Slow Stories, is published in English by Unnamed Press and features fabulist short stories in a surreal, fable-like tone. This interview was conducted by Zoom and has been lightly edited for length and clarity. * * * Misha Grifka Wander: To start off with, what made you want to write Slow Stories? Bette Adriaanse: I’ve always been writing short stories, fable-like stories, fairy tale-ish kind of stories. But it’s quite hard to get fables published. And so I got two novels published, a non-fiction book, and then these stories… I kept performing them whenever I had a reading, and people responded to them and they kept growing and getting more detailed or shorter, and at some point I thought: I actually really love these stories, so I’m going to ask Unnamed Press,…