Interview with author Ann Putnam

By admin, on July 28th, 2010

About Ann Putnam

ANN PUTNAM teaches creative writing and women’s studies at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Washington. She has published short fiction, personal essays, literary criticism, and book reviews in various anthologies such as Hemingway and Women: Female Critics and the Female Voice and in journals, including the Hemingway Review, Western American Literature, and the South Dakota Review. Her recent release is Full Moon at Noontide: A Daughter’s Last Goodbye. You can visit her website at www.annputnam.com.

The Interview

Could you please tell us a little about your book? Did something specific happen to prompt you to write this book? Who or what is the inspiration behind this book?

If I may, I’d like to answer these three questions together. I wrote a memoir about losing my father, Full Moon at Noontide: A Daughters Last Goodbye.
I’d like to reference the “Preface” I wrote for this memoir, which tells the story of my mother and father and my dashing, bachelor uncle, my father’s identical twin, and how they lived together with their courage and their stumblings, as they made their way into old age and then into death. And it’s the story of the journey from one twin’s death to the other, of what happened along the way, of what it means to lose the other who is also oneself.

My story takes the reader through the journey of the end of life: selling the family home, re-location at a retirement community, doctor’s visits, ER visits, specialists, hospitalizations, ICU, nursing homes, Hospice. It takes the reader through the gauntlet of the health care system with all the attendant comedy and sorrows, joys and terrors of such things. Finally it asks: what consolation is there in growing old, in such loss? What abides beyond the telling of my own tale? Wisdom carried from the end of the journey to readers who are perhaps only beginning theirs. Still, what interest in reading of this inevitable journey taken by such ordinary people? Turned to the light just so, the beauty and laughter of the telling transcend the darkness of the tale.

The writing of the book came out of a series of little notebooks of lines, phrases sometimes single words I carried with me like a talisman through the months when I lost my father and my uncle, my father’s identical twin. Those notebooks seem like relics to me now because I remember the places I carried them, where I sat when I wrote in them: hospital cafeterias, emergency rooms, ICU units, hospital hallways, elevators, lobbies. I carried the notebooks to keep me safe, to keep me from rushing out the doors of those hospitals and never coming back. Months after my uncle and my father die (six months to the day apart), I realized I had the beginnings of a book, and a book which I wanted and needed to write, not knowing how it would ever see the light of day.

During the final revisions of this book, my husband was dying of cancer, and he died before I could finish it. What I know so far is this: how pure love becomes when it is distilled through such suffering and loss–a blue flame that flickers and pulses in the deepest heart.

Who is your biggest supporter?

My husband. Although he didn’t get a chance to read this book, as it was published after he died, he was the one who protected my writing life and loved it most. He built a special room for me so that I finally did have a “room of one’s own.”

Your biggest critic?

That’s an easy one. Myself!

What cause are you most passionate about and why?

I suppose this would be gay rights. I have a gay child, and I know the slings and arrows of life that have already come his way. I want him to have a right to all the happiness everyone else is entitled to. Some day I will write about this.

In the last year have you learned or improved on any skills?

Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to point to something specific, and say, yes! This past year I’ve learned to write dialogue more authentically; I’ve learned how to create character beats, or write lavish description, or create tight, unerring plots. I can say none of these things. What I can say is that I have learned to endure. To just hang on, and go to the writing as to the well. I have learned to take long, cool drinks of water from that well.

Do you have any rituals you follow when finishing a piece of work?

In the olden days, let’s say 15 years ago or so, I would put a working manuscript in the freezer any time I left the house for any length of time. I was told that even if the house burned down, the contents of the freezer would be safe. I used to put my manuscript or work in progress in a safe deposit box but kept losing the key. So I guess toward the end of a work I get somewhat edgy and superstitious. Now I fear computer meltdown, so I try to back everything up and then have back ups of my back ups. I don’t always do this, but I worry a lot.

Often I don’t quite know I’m nearing the end of a work until I’m really there. That’s probably a self-protective device so I don’t frighten myself into silence.
I wish I could say I have some magical incantation that involves candles and chanting but I don’t. I just keep listening to the music that most inspires me and is most connected in my mind to what I am writing.

Who has influenced you throughout your career as a writer?

I gain inspiration wherever I can find it. I try to cast a wide net. Other writers, of course, and some beloved colleagues whose own writing life is a continual inspiration to me.

What is the most important thing in your life right now?

My children

What are you currently working on?

I’m currently working on revising a novel called Cuban Quartermoon. It’s a novel set in Havana, Cuba and comes out of six trips to Cuba I took over the years as part of a Hemingway Colloquium sponsored by the Cuban Ministry of Culture. I’m in love with this book, but it’s big and kind of sprawling and defies genre—part magical realism, literary, political thriller. I’m looking at it with an eye to what I should cut. Each time I went to Cuba I came home with another layer of emotion and experience. There is an old Cuban proverb, which says, “Believe only half of what you hear in Cuba and none of what you see.” So there were layers and layers of intrigue, beauty and sorrow to unfold.

Do you have any advice for writers or readers?
In Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott talks about this in her usual charming, disarming and hilarious way: publication is not all it’s cracked up to be. The joy—the spiritual, artistic, life-altering joy—is in the process, not in the outcome of that process, as that is so often out of the writer’s hands.
A poem that has great meaning for me is Marge Piercy’s “For the Young Who Want To.” I’d like to offer a few lines:
“Talent is what they say
you have after the novel is published…
Beforehand what you have is a tedious
delusion, a hobby like knitting . . . .
The real writer is one who really writes. Talent
Is an invention like phlogiston
after the facts of fire.
Work is its own cure. You have to
Like it better than being loved.”
I think the most I can say is that writing is a way of being in the world that puts us fully present in life rather than causes us to withdraw. While my husband was dying, I wrote the “epilogue” to my memoir. I do not know how or why this came to me, but it arrived unbeckoned, all of a piece.

“Writing this now in a rainy light after loss upon loss, a memory comes to me. When I was a teenager, I took voice lessons from Ruth Havstad Almandinger, who gave me exercises and songs I hardly ever practiced. I have wondered why this memory has so suddenly come to me now, and why this, the only song I remember, comes back to me whole and complete:
“Oh! my lover is a fisherman/ and sails on the bright blue river
In his little boat with the crimson sail/ sets he out on the dawn each morning
With his net so strong/ he fishes all the day long
And many are the fish he gathers
Oh! My lover is a fisherman
And he’ll come for me very soon!”

If only I’d known then that my true love would be a fisherman, I might have practiced that song harder and sung it with more feeling, which was what Ruth Havstad Almandinger was always trying to get me to do. If only I’d had a grown up glimpse of my true love when I was sixteen, I would have sung that song so well. If only I’d known he would have cancer and go to the lake for healing the summer after the radiation treatments were done. If only I’d known that I would be his fishing partner that miracle summer of the sockeye come into the lake from the sea. If only I’d known that the cancer would return and that I would do everything I could to save him, knowing all along that he could not be saved, and that my heart would break beyond breaking, then break again. If only I’d seen the sun coming up over the mountains and the sky shift from gray to purple and the pale smudge of light against the mountains turn gold just above the crest. If only I’d seen the sun glinting off those sunslept waters as my love lets down the fishing lines, and off in the distance a salmon leaps—a silver flashing in the sky as if to split the heart of the sun—before it disappears into a soundless splash, in this all too brief and luminous season, to spawn and to die—oh, how I would have sung that song.”

Is there an author that inspired you to write?

Yes. But not just one. So many writers have touched my heart and awakened my sensibility. Ernest Hemingway was probably the first writer who really caught in a deep way for me. It’s interesting because I discovered him as a college sophomore and thought that he’d be an author I’d grow out of, especially with my changing work in gender studies. But wonder of wonders, this is exactly where Hemingway scholarship is going these days. So I continue to find him intriguing. I love any writer who is lyrical and so I’d also add Virginia Woolf and Toni Morrison, and I love several of Ann Patchett’s books. I’ve taught Bel Canto to my college students several times. Marilynne Robinson and Terry Tempest Williams are also beloved to me.

What do feel sets this book apart from others in the same genre?

There are a number of books about losing parents on the market today. Many of them seem to be “advice” or “how to” kinds of books. Mine is a literary memoir about losing my father, and a memoir about loss. But it’s also about losing my uncle, my father’s identical twin brother. So in a sense it was like losing my father twice. The connection between identical twins is an extraordinary one, yet it was just how my family was.

About Full Moon at Noontide

This is the story of my mother and father and my dashing, bachelor uncle, my father’s identical twin, and how they lived together with their courage and their stumblings, as they made their way into old age and then into death. And it’s the story of the journey from one twin’s death to the other, of what happened along the way, of what it means to lose the other who is also oneself.

As I finish this book he is gone three months.

Be Sociable, Share!