Suss: another literary journal

“I don’t know what’s going to hap­pen. That’s really important.”

SUSS: So you’ve pub­lished short sto­ries, nov­els, non­fic­tion, poetry—

ANN HARLEMAN: Translations, reviews…

SUSS: Right. You’ve pretty much writ­ten every pos­si­ble genre across the board. You even trans­lated a Bach Cantata that was staged by the Seattle Symphony Orchestra if I’m not mis­taken. Could you talk about the process of mov­ing between gen­res? How are your ideas fil­tered between gen­res? For instance, how do you know when you’re work­ing on a short story as com­pared to a novel.

AH: Oh, that’s actu­ally hard to tell. I’ve had a cou­ple of nov­els that kind of died on me about a hun­dred pages in. I turned them into nice, dense short sto­ries, because I don’t like to waste any­thing. And I may go back to them actu­ally. There’s one in Thoreau’s Laundry—which was my third book, my sec­ond col­lec­tion of short stories—there’s three sto­ries in there that are con­nected: they’re all set in Russia in the Soviet Union and the peo­ple are related to each other, or about to be related, I guess. And one of those is con­densed from a novel that died and the other two were writ­ten because I real­ized that I still had more to say about the place and about the kind of peo­ple who live in that place. Someday those together might be the spring­board for an even longer thing that could be a novel.

SUSS: Both of your nov­els actu­ally are, in some way, elon­gated ver­sions of sto­ries that appeared in Happiness.

AH: Yeah, some­times I use short sto­ries to sort of audi­tion char­ac­ters and sit­u­a­tions and set­tings and then I find that I could do some­thing longer because I’m inter­ested in the char­ac­ter or the story.

SUSS: So, specif­i­cally in terms of Bitter Lake and The Year She Disappeared, were those sit­u­a­tions where you were think­ing about the char­ac­ters and look­ing to move them for­ward or was it more you had sort of plot ideas and thought those char­ac­ters could live within that world?

AH: With The Year She Disappeared, I was try­ing to teach myself plot, so it’s really sort of over-plotted. A lot hap­pens. And even that’s pruned down from the ver­sion I actu­ally sub­mit­ted for pub­li­ca­tion. Yeah, it got sim­pler. [Laughs.] But, Bitter Lake was more about the char­ac­ters and how they devel­oped as I wrote them and how they inter­acted and what it felt like they would do with each other. It has a lit­tle bit of a mys­tery twist to it, in terms of its struc­ture, but that wasn’t a plot­ting thought on my part. It was more just how it worked out with those char­ac­ters. The father char­ac­ter being this guy who just goes away—people dis­ap­pear in my work quite a bit—so he dis­ap­pears and the ques­tion was, Where was he? Why had he left?

SUSS: Speaking of mys­tery, I was won­der­ing about that, espe­cially with The Year She Disappeared. There’s some sense there that you’re con­sciously play­ing with genre. While it’s undoubt­edly lit­er­ary, there’s an almost episodic struc­ture to it, there are mys­ter­ies sur­round­ing cer­tain points of the plot and cer­tain char­ac­ters’ back-stories, the CIA makes an appear­ance, there’s a sort of cat-and-mouse chase. I know that you co-authored a lit­er­ary biog­ra­phy of Ian Fleming, so you’re cer­tainly famil­iar with mys­tery and thriller genre nov­els, but how con­scious were you of those con­ven­tions while writ­ing the book?

AH: Quite a bit, actu­ally. My for­mer hus­band was my co-author for the Ian Fleming book. It was a crit­i­cal lit­er­ary biog­ra­phy. And, I have to say, he did more of the work on it. His spe­cialty as a scholar was, well, he started as a medieval­ist, then he did folk­lore, then he did detec­tive fic­tion and spy fic­tion. He moved around a lot. But he knew a lot about espi­onage and espi­onage nov­els. And I just thought, Huh.

Some of the set-up in The Year She Disappeared was inspired by an actual, real-life story. A woman named Elizabeth Morgan. She was a doc­tor who thought her three-year-old daugh­ter was being sex­u­ally abused by her hus­band. So her par­ents took the daugh­ter and went to New Zealand. And Elizabeth was jailed for two years for contempt—which tech­ni­cally you can’t do in this coun­try, but she was jailed any­way. And Elizabeth said that she was not going to give up the loca­tion of Hillary—her daughter’s name was Hillary—even if she had to stay in jail until the child was eigh­teen. So I was already inter­ested in that. And then it turns out her par­ents, who took the child to New Zealand, her father was a retired CIA agent and that’s how he was able to dis­ap­pear and knew where to go where there wouldn’t be extra­di­tion and so on. And again I thought, Huh, maybe I could use that. So I began con­sult­ing my for­mer hus­band about spy stuff, because I didn’t know much of any­thing about spy stuff. It was an accre­tion process rather than sit­ting down and say­ing, “I’m going to do a take-off on this cer­tain genre.”

SUSS: So it was more a nat­ural pro­gres­sion than a planned event.

AH: Yeah, yeah. I’m not a very top-down writer that way.

SUSS: So you often start with the idea and then write for­ward with­out know­ing where you’re going?

AH: Yes. So long as it stays alive under my hand then I’m happy.

SUSS: What would the work stay­ing alive mean for you?

AH: Well, things keep hap­pen­ing and when—I try to write every morn­ing. Hemingway said writ­ing is not a full time job and God knows I have plenty to do the rest of the day, but dur­ing that more fal­low part of the 24 hours, if I’m get­ting ideas about the work then it’s stay­ing alive. Especially if when I wake up in the morn­ing and think, Oh, she could be going to such-and-such or He could say such-and-such. So it’s stay­ing alive that way.

And I don’t know what’s going to hap­pen. That’s really impor­tant. A cou­ple times when I’ve fig­ured a whole story out and I knew exactly how it should work and so on, I couldn’t write it. Because I’m not inter­ested at that point.

SUSS: Really?

AH: Yeah. I just lose all interest.

SUSS: So the joy of it for you is writ­ing into the dark­ness, find­ing your way.

AH: Yeah. It’s not like my liv­ing depends on writ­ing, so I’m really free to just write what inter­ests me or moves me.

“Fiction is protection.”

SUSS: One thing I was struck by in reread­ing your books was this idea that so many of your char­ac­ters are affected by infor­ma­tion that’s hid­den from them within their fam­ily. Or, in some way they’re being con­fronted with hid­den infor­ma­tion, infor­ma­tion that they either don’t know or don’t want to know. Is that an inten­tional touch­stone in your fic­tion or did that just come about naturally?

AH: It’s actu­ally some­thing that I wasn’t even aware of until some­one men­tioned it to me a few years ago. And now it’s not really some­thing I could con­trol. If I decided, Well, I’m not gonna do that any­more, I don’t think I’d be able to. It just kind of comes out.

For me there are quite a few themes or sit­u­a­tions or char­ac­ter types or per­son­al­ity types that just pop out that I’m not really even notic­ing until some­one says, “That char­ac­ter is really sim­i­lar to that char­ac­ter” or “You’re really pre­oc­cu­pied with this type of sit­u­a­tion.” Or peo­ple say to me, “A lot of your work is about loss.” I wasn’t aware of that! I don’t feel like my life is per­me­ated with loss and I cer­tainly don’t sit down and think, Loss! I can do some­thing for the world along the lines of loss! I don’t think that at all. Which again is a lit­tle embar­rass­ing to admit. There’s so much that’s not con­trolled. And if I tried to con­trol it, I don’t think that would have a good effect on the work.

SUSS: Controlling the themes and the pre­oc­cu­pa­tions of your writing?

AH: Yeah. If I thought, I’m just gonna straighten up. I’m gonna watch what I do and I’m not gonna do this, do more of that, I’m afraid I wouldn’t want to write anymore.

SUSS: Well, then you’d know the out­come. The mys­tery would be gone for you.

AH: Yes, but I would also feel under sur­veil­lance. Even if it’s just me watch­ing myself. I once tried to keep a dream jour­nal, because that seemed like a good thing to do. This is back more than twenty years ago when I first started writ­ing fic­tion seri­ously. I did it for about a week, a week and a half. I still have the notes. I was hav­ing really inter­est­ing dreams and I’m writ­ing them down and it was work­ing. But it was just the creepi­est thing. I had trou­ble sleep­ing. I felt like some­one was watch­ing my brain while I slept. I really started hav­ing trou­ble sleep­ing, you know. I just felt uneasy. It was creepy. It was like when I was liv­ing in the Soviet Union where I felt like unseen eyes were fol­low­ing me around all the time.

SUSS: That leads to some­thing I had wanted to ask about. Your liv­ing in the Soviet Union cer­tainly affected Nan’s biog­ra­phy in The Year She Disappeared and some of the sto­ries in Thoreau’s Laundry. And some of the other sto­ries in Thoreau’s Laundry deal explic­itly with med­ical issues within a fam­ily, much like what you’ve spo­ken about as regard­ing your own life. I’m won­der­ing how much of your per­sonal life you fil­ter through into your fic­tion. And how pro­tec­tive of it are you?

AH: Fiction is pro­tec­tion. The piece that you’re refer­ring to that I wrote about my hus­band for the AARP, that was so hard for me to write. I wrote it for an anthol­ogy that it first appeared in and then my agent sold it to AARP. Writing it was just ter­ri­bly hard for me because I couldn’t make things up. And I was con­stantly bump­ing up against my under­stand­ing that I could con­vey the essence of an expe­ri­ence or I could open an expe­ri­ence or develop a feel­ing for the reader bet­ter if I could make up dia­logue or I could make up incidents.

In some sense, the truth for me doesn’t reside in facts. Sometimes it does but often it doesn’t. And at the same time, when that piece came out in AARP Magazine—this is how naïve I am—I didn’t really under­stand how many peo­ple who would read it who knew me and knew Bruce. It was so embar­rass­ing. I didn’t think any­one would read the anthol­ogy (though it turned out that they did) but I was so used to pub­lish­ing in lit­er­ary mag­a­zines that nobody you know reads except your writer friends. But they for­give you every­thing because they’re doing the exact same stuff. [Laughs.] I just didn’t get it.

But when I did finally under­stand it—on the eve of pub­li­ca­tion, though I still had time to with­draw it, a few months, I guess, before it came out—I took it into Bruce, who I visit just about every day in the nurs­ing home, I took it and I said, “I wrote this piece. It’s kind of about you. It’s going to appear in AARP Magazine. First you look good, then you look bad, then you look good again. And if you don’t want me to pub­lish it, I won’t. Do you want me to read it to you?” And he just said, “No, thanks.” [Laughs.]

Writing, as Graham Greene pointed out, is a form of ther­apy. It can really be won­der­ful in that way. I think all the arts are. So some­times if there’s some­thing in my life that I’m really grap­pling with—again, it’s that idea that what you don’t know or what you don’t under­stand pulls you for­ward. In some cases, a lot of pent up…not exactly emo­tion, though some­times it’s emo­tion, but some­times it’s things you notice that you just want to get out. That’s a rel­a­tively rare moti­va­tion for me. But around the issue of fam­ily ill­ness, yeah, it cer­tainly was. Because it’s so intense and, in our case, has been going on for twenty-five years so there’s a lot to draw from and process.

“In some ways, it’s the oppo­site of under­stand­ing. It’s not Dr. Phil.”

SUSS: You said the truth is not always in the facts for you. Is the truth for you more in your response to those facts or the act of work­ing it out on paper?

AH: Well, what I think fic­tion does and why I want to write it and read it and what I hope it does for read­ers is to give peo­ple an expe­ri­ence they wouldn’t oth­er­wise have. So, you can take them some­where else in time, the past or the future; you can take them some­where else in space, to a dif­fer­ent cul­ture, dif­fer­ent land­scape, dif­fer­ent coun­try; or you can take them psy­cho­log­i­cally some­where they wouldn’t nor­mally go. David Malouf, who’s a writer I like, has a novella called Child’s Play that is from the point of view of a hired assas­sin. So you can take a reader inside some­one they’re never going to be able to be or some­one they wouldn’t want to be. And in order to do that, you have to give them an expe­ri­ence. You have to open it up so they can walk inside it. And, well, if you’re stuck with the facts, that’s just so con­strict­ing in terms of doing that.

In many ways, any time you start some­thing, it’s new. Like any time you start a poem, you’re like, Oh my god, can I do this? You might as well never have writ­ten a poem before. But there are cer­tain things that do carry over and improve with prac­tice. One of them is the rangi­ness of the imag­i­na­tion, where if you’ve writ­ten fic­tion for a while and you’ve really got­ten into it then sud­denly some­body says, “Just the facts, ma’am”—it is a shock. It’s like the Ben-Hur char­iot race scene, where you’re rein­ing in all these horses that just want to go in dif­fer­ent direc­tions. You then have power that you can’t use. It’s very frustrating.

SUSS: Right, of course. It’s lim­it­ing your abil­ity to think. A large part of the way that you inter­act with the world is being confined.

AH: Yeah, exactly. And I think, from talk­ing to non­fic­tion writ­ers, they get a dif­fer­ent kind of sat­is­fac­tion out of writ­ing, say, mem­oirs, which has a lot in com­mon with fic­tion in terms of the basics of nar­ra­tive and the degree to which you want really clear and strong lan­guage to hook your reader. There’s lots in com­mon there. But where writ­ing a non­fic­tion piece takes a non­fic­tion writer is not where I want to go, in a way. After I’ve writ­ten my more auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal stuff, I don’t feel I under­stand it any bet­ter, I just feel like I got it out—I explored the ques­tion but I didn’t get an answer. I got out a lot of the com­plex­ity to where some­one else can also see it, so I don’t feel so lonely. But as far as under­stand­ing bet­ter, I don’t. And I’m not try­ing to get the reader to under­stand it bet­ter. It’s more giv­ing them the feel of it. In some ways, it’s the oppo­site of under­stand­ing. It’s not Dr. Phil. [Laughs.] His neat­ness is the oppo­site of what I’m doing.

SUSS: In that sense, have there been instances where you’ve turned to your own biog­ra­phy in writ­ing rather than mak­ing the jump to the imag­ined lives of your char­ac­ters? Or have there been time when you have done that then thought bet­ter of it and edited those pieces out?

AH: No, I have trou­ble edit­ing things out if I think they belong there. For my hus­band, when we were mar­ried, after Happiness came out, I over­heard him say once to some­body, “I don’t read Ann’s work any­more because I read the first few sto­ries and they caused me a lot of pain.” [Laughs.] And my daugh­ter, who’s 36, every time a new book comes out I give her a copy and she puts it on the top shelf, because she doesn’t want my grand­sons to read them. Although the older one of course has for that very rea­son. But it goes up on the top shelf and she doesn’t read them. Which I think she does out of some pro­tec­tive impulse. Which is fine, of course.

SUSS: Thoreau’s Laundry, too? She was even on the cover of that one!

AH: I know. She didn’t like that one bit. [Laughs.] I mean, she didn’t object to it, but she found it embar­rass­ing rather than fun. My grand­sons got a kick out of it, though. [In a lit­tle boy’s voice]: “There’s mommy as a baby!”

“You’re tuned in not just to the ori­gins of lan­guage and its rel­a­tives but its more vis­ceral, musi­cal aspects as well.”

SUSS: Glancing over your aca­d­e­mic publications—I’ve not read them, but there’s a big range. There’s lin­guis­tics, the sprung rhythm of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Old English stud­ies. How have all of your aca­d­e­mic inter­ests affected your cre­ative work? There’s cer­tainly a sort of play­ful­ness and com­plex­ity to the sentence-level work of your fic­tion that hints at these inter­ests, but I was won­der­ing if you could talk more specif­i­cally about how some of your aca­d­e­mic pur­suits affect your cre­ative process.

AH: Well, my PhD is in Linguistics, spe­cial­iz­ing in Germanic lan­guages (which English is one of). So I ended up teach­ing in English depart­ments. But I was teach­ing struc­ture of English—you know, gram­mar and dialect vari­eties of English, his­tory of English—and I was also teach­ing, because I had stud­ied it, Old English lan­guage and lit­er­a­ture—Beowulf and stuff like that. So that was my area of spe­cial­iza­tion within an English depart­ment. But I just love words. I love lan­guages. I’m intensely inter­ested in it all. So it’s reward­ing for me to work with words. It almost doesn’t mat­ter to me if they’re my words or some­body else’s words. If I’m work­ing with stu­dents try­ing to help them find the best way to say some­thing or, I’m in a long-standing Providence-area writer’s group. It’s existed for some­thing like eigh­teen years and we cri­tique each other’s work. And that’s also really sat­is­fy­ing to me. It really doesn’t have to be my words.

When I was lit­tle we weren’t allowed to read at the break­fast table. We weren’t sup­posed to bring a book to the table. I was, of course, one of these really nerdy, com­pul­sive read­ers. So I would read the back and side of the cereal box. And I can remember—I was only eight or nine, maybe ten—rewriting the text on the cereal box, think­ing, “They don’t need that word” and “They can put those words there.” It was just some­thing, I don’t know. It was like play­ing with clay. It was really fun. Which was really motivating.

So study­ing lan­guage from a more “sci­en­tific” point of view was also deeply inter­est­ing. Knowing those ear­lier stages of the language—when I write a sen­tence in English, I know I would be able to trans­late that sen­tence if I needed to into French, German, Italian; I know whether the words are Anglo-Saxon or Latinate or bor­rowed from some other lan­guage; I know what the cog­nate is in German; I know the roots of those words in Old English if they existed in Old English. So there’s all these lay­ers to work­ing with lan­guage for me because of the way I stud­ied it that I think really keeps me going.

SUSS: Keeps it con­tin­u­ally interesting?

AH: Exactly. Keeps that feel­ing going that there’s more to know or more to notice.

SUSS: Are you dip­ping into that knowl­edge on the sur­face while you’re writ­ing sen­tence to sen­tence every morn­ing or is some­thing that comes out in revi­sion? Or is it sim­ply an ingrained part of your rela­tion­ship with language?

AH: I guess it’s sort of present in a sub­lim­i­nal, silent way in both processes. If at any moment you stopped me and said, “So, what’s the ety­mol­ogy of that word?” I could do it, I could go down or across the lan­guages. Or—and I’m often aware of this as well—I could say, “The rhythm of this sen­tence is the rhythm of a line from a Roethke poem or an Elizabeth Bishop poem.” Or it’s the rhythm of an Anglo-Saxon phrase or…I used to feel really guilty about this. Sometimes what I said would be because I needed two more beats in that sen­tence or phrase or I needed a one syl­la­ble word.

SUSS: What you said in con­ver­sa­tion? Or in your writing?

AH: What I said in writ­ing. The con­tent would be deter­mined by the rhythm. And I used to feel really guilty about this. Like, bet­ter not tell any­one about this because it’s too friv­o­lous. And then I read some­where Don Delillo say­ing he did exactly the same thing and I real­ized, Oh, that’s what writ­ers do. You’re tuned in not just to the ori­gins of lan­guage and its rel­a­tives but its more vis­ceral, musi­cal aspects as well.

SUSS: Were you sur­prised that you lean more heav­ily toward prose nar­ra­tives than verse?

AH: No. I only ever wrote poems because I had some ideas about those spe­cific poems. I don’t write poetry anymore.

SUSS: The way that you speak about language—

AH: It sounds more like a poet. It does. That doesn’t really inter­est me very much, writ­ing poetry. And when I read poetry, I often have this feeling—I’ve recently been read­ing Kay Ryan. I’ve dis­cov­ered her a lit­tle later than the rest of the lit­er­ary word, I guess. [Laughs.] I just came back from a stretch in the Bay Area and of course she lives there so she’s really big there.

SUSS: Being Poet Laureate prob­a­bly doesn’t hurt.

AH: Probably not. [Laughs.] So I was read­ing a book of hers on the plane and I was think­ing that poets get away with this thing where they have one or two thoughts or an image and they can get a whole piece out of it. A free stand­ing [holds up her hands in an L7, mak­ing a box about the size of an aver­age poem.] That would just be a sen­tence for me in a much longer stretch of sen­tences. But I like it that way.

SUSS: We cheat, us poets. We’re all cheaters.

AH: Oh, you’re a poet? Uh-oh. [Laughs.] Well, I don’t mean to say that’s all poets do, but, for me, it’s just not big enough. Because the inten­sity that you have to bring to every poem—those one or two ideas—I wouldn’t want to bring that to every sen­tence I write. I need stretches where it’s just…You know when you’re swim­ming and you’re very ener­get­i­cally doing the crawl or the breast­stroke and other times you just flip over and float.

SUSS: You need to take a break, relax. Come up for air.

AH: Yeah. Poets can’t do that.

“You have to first gen­er­ate the mar­ble and then you have to find the story inside that big block of text that you made.”

SUSS: Switching gears a lit­tle bit, I wanted to ask you about teach­ing. Could you talk gen­er­ally about your teach­ing phi­los­o­phy and what’s impor­tant for you to get across in cre­ative writ­ing class? How if at all does that goal changes when you’re teach­ing lit­er­a­ture or some­thing else?

AH: I’ve spent the last four­teen years teach­ing at RISD and I think I’m really for­tu­nate to have that kind of stu­dent pop­u­la­tion. These kids are very intense, they work very hard, they’re devoted. They’re artists to the core. So they’re great with cri­tiques: they already under­stand that from the visual arts as a process of mak­ing some­thing. And the stu­dents I teach, because I teach elec­tives, they’re pretty ver­bal. They’re not the aver­age visual artists, I think. But they’re not very well versed in lit­er­a­ture and they’re touch­ingly hum­ble about that. They lis­ten when you tell them some­thing about writ­ing. Though they are artists, so they don’t take a lot of advice. But they do lis­ten. [Laughs.]

They’re so inven­tive that they’re mak­ing things that are really unusual within a course that’s called Fiction Writing Workshop. I’ve had stu­dents do short sto­ries, nov­els, mem­oirs, graphic nov­els, children’s books with illus­tra­tions and with­out, screen­plays, and I’ve had a cou­ple stu­dents do nar­ra­tive as part of a sculp­tural instal­la­tions. One stu­dent had this alter ego that he was writ­ing about dur­ing the course of the semes­ter. It was this kid—I’ve for­got­ten some of the details in the years since—although it was set in the present day, the kid had had an ampu­ta­tion and had a wooden leg, not the kind of pros­the­sis you’d expect today. It was a wooden leg painted blue. And there were a few other things involved in this kid’s story. In his stu­dio he’d made the wooden leg and painted it blue, there was a rolled up rug…there were a lot of props involved, maps and things. And then he had like a garbage bag full of sheets of nar­ra­tive. Single spaced text on one side, so there was quite a bit of space filled, maybe 500 words on each page. And each one was a self-contained inci­dent but they could be fit­ted together into a longer cohe­sive whole. They were wadded up sep­a­rately into balls and all placed in this bag. So you reached into the bag and you took one. Whatever you hap­pened to pick was your guide through the instal­la­tion. So, when the rest of the class had to work­shop his piece, we all had to go over to his stu­dio and run through it that way.

SUSS: That sounds pretty awesome.

AH: It was, it was. That kind of vari­ety has been good for me. And, I think, good for the stu­dents. No group of stu­dents any­where else could use­fully, help­fully cri­tique a piece of work like that. They just wouldn’t bring enough dif­fer­ent skills and per­spec­tives to it. But I’m get­ting off the sub­ject here aren’t I? I didn’t really talk about my phi­los­o­phy at all, did I?

SUSS: Well, is there a com­mon­al­ity through all of your teach­ing sit­u­a­tions where there’s one piece of infor­ma­tion that you need to impart to a workshop?

AH: Yeah, all work­shops I do, even short ones at sum­mer pro­grams, and lit­er­a­ture courses, they’re built around what I con­sider the main ele­ments of nar­ra­tive struc­ture. I also teach a course at RISD called Fiction into Films where we read the nov­els, look at the film adap­ta­tions, and then we com­plain. But it’s there, too: you can look at those ele­ments of nar­ra­tive as they’re ren­dered in other media like opera or bal­let or film, so they’re not just inher­ent to prose. And they make a com­mon meet­ing ground.

Let’s see if I can get all of the ele­ments I teach: plot, dia­logue, char­ac­ter, set­ting ver­sus scene, sense detail, style, and…I’m miss­ing one. Oh, it’ll come to me. This is so embar­rass­ing. Fell free to jump in at any point! [Laughs.]

SUSS: I’m draw­ing a blank as well.

AH: Sure. [Laughs.] Anyway, I always try to hit on those and I have exer­cises and sam­ple read­ings and all of the usual things, but as far as what the stu­dents write, I try to make them aware that when you ana­lyze a work of fic­tion you can do it by look­ing at these build­ing blocks of nar­ra­tive and look at how these other writ­ers have used these ele­ments. As Henry James said, the house of fic­tion has many rooms.

So, what the stu­dents want to write is up to them, what genre or sub­genre, how lit­er­ary it is or how long it is or if it’s more image-based like a graphic novel. I had one stu­dent the spring before last who was doing a seri­al­ized comic strip. So she’d work­shop a bunch of install­ments from a comic strip. The other stu­dents were great with it. You can apply these nar­ra­tive ele­ments to anything.

Point of View! That’s the other one! Thank you, God. [Laughs.]

Anyway, for their writ­ing for the class, I have them work on some­thing that they want to make and that they care about. Rather than some­thing like, For this class we’re going to make so-and-so. Or, First you’re going to write from this point of view and then you’re going to write from the other point of view! For the exer­cises we do this, but not for their actual pieces. Forget that.

Along the way we also touch on tense and per­son and aspect and things that are more tech­ni­cal. Then we do a unit on revis­ing. I say to them, 80% of a suc­cess­ful piece of fic­tion is revis­ing. That’s where the real writ­ing comes in. The draft is like…you know that thing Michelangelo said, that he looks at the block of mar­ble and he tries to release the fig­ure that’s in there? I remind my stu­dents of that, which they all know because they’re art stu­dents. I say, it’s even worse in this class because you have to first gen­er­ate the mar­ble and then you have to find the story inside that big block of text that you made. So I stress that’s it’s really impor­tant for them to feel free when they’re draft­ing and then to be more rig­or­ous while they’re revis­ing while at the same time being more open to let­ting the text talk back to them.

“Uh-oh, there’s some­thing wrong with me.”

SUSS: You had said ear­lier that you have trou­ble let­ting some­thing go if you feel some­thing belongs in a story. What is your revis­ing process like if, as you said, 80% of a suc­cess­ful piece is in revision?

AH: Oh, it’s every­thing. Revision is everything.

I have writer friends whose writ­ing process I know pretty well and it’s almost as though they can’t stop them­selves from writ­ing when they’re draft­ing and it would just be painful for them if you stopped them. So they do a lot of cut­ting. I’m not like that. But I try…Well, I’m pretty instinc­tive so it’s hard for me to say I do this, this, and this. I revise more or less like I teach revi­sion, which maybe sounds a lit­tle bit artificial.

So, you have this story and it may not have started in the right place and it may not end so well and there may be chunks miss­ing in the chain of events or maybe this story needs the events told out of order in some way; some inci­dents may be too long right now, some too short; some inci­dents should be sum­mary instead of scene if not only for the con­tent but also the pac­ing. And often you don’t know what the cen­ter of your story is until you have a draft. Walter Abish said, “Find the cen­tral thing, then move it to an impor­tant posi­tion and build on it.” So that’s really impor­tant in this first level of revising.

And Elmore Leonard said some­thing like, “I try to leave out the parts peo­ple skip.” And that’s just so use­ful, espe­cially in work­shop. And that’s first level revis­ing, too, where I’m think­ing about the rough struc­ture of the piece.

And with this—I give my stu­dents a sheet that has pieces of advice from writ­ers. Grace Paley said some­thing like, “Remove all the lies: lies of form, lies of con­tent.” To their credit, my stu­dents usu­ally don’t ask what that means, they know. But occa­sion­ally some­one will ask and I say, “You know. You know where the lies are.” Although that’s not entirely true. Sometimes in work­shop you have a draft where you’re think­ing, “I won­der if I can get away with this?” And you should, you should have a draft that’s like that. Otherwise you end up cen­sor­ing your­self too soon.

Then, sec­ond, you can go in and fine tune the struc­ture, fig­ure out what still needs to go in and look more closely at the char­ac­ters. Feedback is really help­ful in this respect, espe­cially with char­ac­ter. I’ve seen this over and over in my work. I work­shop with a group of estab­lished writ­ers in the Providence area and the way it’s set up is the same way I run a work­shop: every­one reads the piece a week or two in advance, writes com­ments on it, brings it to the meet­ing, and then there’s a thirty/forty minute dis­cus­sion where the author isn’t allowed to speak. So you’re sit­ting there, lis­ten­ing to them over and over again say­ing, “This char­ac­ter, she’s so solip­sis­tic, she’s so self-absorbed.” Or, “Yeah, her pas­siv­ity really made me mad…” And it’s almost like they’re tak­ing for granted cer­tain char­ac­ter­is­tics and you can see, on the face of the author of the piece, you can see this dawn­ing expres­sion of, I thought this char­ac­ter was com­pletely nor­mal. Uh-oh, there’s some­thing wrong with me.

We all have our own set of quirks. I feel myself, I mean I don’t know how my fel­low writ­ers do it, but I make a lot of changes based on what peo­ple say. Often the locus of the prob­lem is some­where else, but those com­ments drive us back into the work with dif­fer­ent eyes. And the char­ac­ters, espe­cially, get more rounded and get more depth to them after those dis­cus­sions. I don’t think you get that per­spec­tive any­where else. Even if you put it away in a drawer for six months, you’re not going to get that fresh­ness, that wholly new perspective.

And the final level, after you’ve got­ten all those other points sorted out—because it’s point­less to do it before—you start look­ing at para­graphs and sen­tences. So that the lan­guage is won­der­fully struc­tured. And some of it will be strong already, because you do have moments. Margaret Atwood described it as the extra rab­bit com­ing out of the hat, the one you didn’t put there. You have those moments when you’re draft­ing, but you also have some deadwood.

“Sure, other attrac­tive peo­ple come along, but if the ini­tial thing that brings you together is as deep as it should be, it doesn’t get exhausted.”

SUSS: What draws you in as a reader? What are the hall­marks of a good read­ing expe­ri­ence for you?

AH: I have a thirty page test for nov­els. Like a lot of read­ers, I find my time is get­ting more lim­ited, though I don’t entirely under­stand why. So if after thirty pages I’m not hooked, that’s it for that book. My traf­fic between here and the main branch of the library, I’m sure, is a well-worn path.

So, first of all, I look for the lan­guage, the voice, the style. I don’t mean that it needs to be really fancy and man­nered. That’s not what I mean. Just, if it feels good, strong, grace­ful, inter­est­ing. And that can take a lot of dif­fer­ent forms. For instance, I’m review­ing the new Margaret Atwood novel for The Boston Globe, and while I like Margaret Atwood, this new one is an apoc­a­lypse story, basi­cally sci­ence fic­tion, which is not some­thing I’m all that inter­ested in, not some­thing I ever read. But she had me by the bot­tom of the first page because that voice is so strong, it’s beau­ti­ful, it’s funny, it’s unex­pected, com­pletely in com­mand of the lan­guage with­out being man­nered or self-conscious or hoity-toity. I mean, it’s clear the char­ac­ter is in the hands of some­one who can really do it. It’s not always estab­lished writ­ers, either. Kiran Desai’s sec­ond novel, The Inheritance of Loss, was one that did that, too. Terrific book. And she’s a young writer, not all that prac­ticed, but she had that thing where she just knew what to do with the lan­guage. So if that’s there I don’t need too much else. But that’s not there all that often. So I also need to feel that through the novel, the writer is telling me some­thing I don’t know or is tak­ing me some­where I’m not likely to go and haven’t been.

There is some other fac­tor but I’m not sure what it is. Maybe it’s a gestalt, or…it might have some­thing to do with the inten­sity and purity of an author’s con­nec­tion to her mate­r­ial. Nadine Gordimer was at Brown years ago, maybe in 1987, when I was an over-age stu­dent in the MFA pro­gram. I went to see her read and after­ward some­one in the audi­ence asked her “What do you do about your reader? You’re writ­ing these things about apartheid in South Africa and it’s sort of a closed world and you can’t expect read­ers to under­stand, so how do you address that prob­lem?” And she said, “Oh, I never think about my reader at all. I just worry about main­tain­ing the ten­sion between myself and my mate­r­ial.” That answer cleared up so much for me I remem­ber I had tears in my eyes. The guy next to me, who was about ten years younger than me, one of my fel­low MFA stu­dents, he looked at me and said, “What’s the mat­ter with you?” Like, These middle-aged women, what are we gonna do with them? [Laughs.] So sens­ing some­thing like that in the book is very impor­tant, too.

SUSS: What writ­ers most strongly influ­enced you at the start of your career?

AH: Oh, let’s keep in mind you always leave some­body off the list. [Laughs.] The writ­ers that really spoke to me when I first started writ­ing seri­ously really are, a lot of them, writ­ers who still influ­ence me. I would say, Alice Munro—a lot of people’s god­dess, right?—Elizabeth Bishop, David Malouf, Pat Barker, Grace Paley, and Mavis Gallant. A lot of the writ­ers I really care about are short story writ­ers and not nov­el­ists, yet I pre­fer to read nov­els. Not sure what that’s about. [Laughs.]

Let’s see, who else? Chekhov, Shakespeare—I’m sorry, but there it is—and Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Some writ­ers I was infat­u­ated with in the first decade of my writ­ing life that I’ve maybe out­grown who would still be valu­able: Alice Adams, Michael Ondaatje, Theodore Roethke, who’s a won­der­ful poet and I love him but I don’t feel a need to reread him like I do Bishop or these oth­ers. I think I feel okay about this answer. I may need to revisit it.

SUSS: Well, it’s a hard one. There’s a sense that you’re always revis­ing it, reorder­ing the top five.

AH: Well, I think you’re revis­ing it less than one might think. At least with influ­ences. It’s like falling in love, like mar­riage: you’re in it for life. Sure, other attrac­tive peo­ple come along, but if the ini­tial thing that brings you together is as deep as it should be, it doesn’t get exhausted.

SUSS: Has there been recent work that you’ve found attrac­tive? That has lin­gered in that way?

AH: Through review­ing, I’ve dis­cov­ered a whole bunch of women writers—and it really is often women writ­ers who appeal to me. Not because of the con­tent, I just think they’re writ­ing bet­ter. So, I’ve dis­cov­ered a whole lot of younger women writ­ers that I’ve reviewed, women rang­ing from their late-30s to mid-50s, almost none of who are American. This won’t be a com­plete list either. Helen Dunmore, Anne Enright, A.L. Kennedy, Kate Atkinson, Rachel Cusk, and Jeanette Winterson, Zadie Smith, Kiran Desai, Tessa Hadley, and Andrea Levy. I would read anything—and do read anything—these women come up with. I always learn from them. You know that feel­ing you get when you read some­thing or see some­thing and you want to run out and try to make some­thing your­self? Not because you think you can do it bet­ter, but because it’s so excit­ing and it’s like, “Wow, there’s all that that can be done?” And you just want to try to do a lit­tle piece of it your­self. They do that for me.

SUSS: One last ques­tion and it’s an easy one: what are you work­ing on now?

AH: That is easy! [Laughs.] I’ve got­ten inter­ested recently, because I love Italy, and I started study­ing Italian about ten years ago, and I’ve had the good luck to get a lot of paid trip to Italy to visit artists’ colonies or through paid grants the last decade, but I got inter­ested in a 16^th cen­tury woman Italian painter named Sofonisba Anguissola.

I think I might try my hand at writ­ing some­thing about her that’s that far removed in time. Just because I can’t get her out of my mind. The way she lived her life, which I won’t go into too much, and the length of it, a lot of the issues that are impor­tant to me now about aging, the last quar­ter of life, look­ing back, so on, all of that could work them­selves out in a fic­tional treat­ment of her life. Plus, there’s only one biog­ra­phy of her and it’s in Italian. I read it and believe me, it took me many hun­dreds of hours! [Laughs.] So just not that much is known about her, which means there’s plenty of room to make things up. And there’s room for that idea of dis­cov­er­ing as I write that keeps me going.