Season 3, episode 32 transcript:
All the Roads That Lead from Home
Thursday, April 28, 2022
[Transcript]
Laura: Back in the winter of 2012, when my husband Nate and I were new parents, we went on a hike in the Oakland hills. I remember willing myself to be stronger as we pushed our son in the jogging stroller, the rushing valley stream beside us. I remember breathing in reminders of how lucky I was to live in a place where a five minute drive up the hill could get me this.
But on this particular occasion, my gratitude fell short. We’d come to the hills to make a decision. We were there to talk about me giving up on writing.
We’d moved to California eight years before so I could get my MFA in fiction. At the time, Nate had just graduated from advertising portfolio school, won an award, and left behind potential job opportunities in Minneapolis, Kansas City, and New York.
He said he didn’t mind—even though moving meant starting over and leaving every professional connection he had. He said we could take turns pursuing our dreams.
For two years, he applied for jobs by the hundreds while I learned how to craft stories. We patched together minimum wage jobs and worked for our landlord so we could pay our rent.
When I graduated, I took a full-time job coaching collegiate runners so we could pursue another dream: a 2-bedroom starter home with just enough room to imagine a life that was bigger.
In 2010, it was my turn to dream-chase again. I got a creative writing Fulbright to the Philippines, and we quit our reliable jobs, rented our house to strangers, and moved across the world to volunteer with sex trafficking survivors.
For a year, we spent our days with women we’d come to help—but who instead helped us. We found ourselves students to single moms who hadn’t finished high school but were masters of the human condition. They taught us to embrace the paradox of a life that could contain both unspeakable tragedy and bottomless joy.
We came to Manila in pieces, finally admitting that after years of overwork and insufficient communication, our marriage was crumbling. We learned from the women not how to regain what we’d lost, but to create something new. The novel I was there to write came out in drips of sweat, torrents of rain, slashes of sun.
We came back from the Philippines changed, no longer chasing something beyond us, but rather trying to understand how we could find contentment and joy in the life we were in. We were learning to embrace the journey that would take us here, to you and to this podcast, years before we even knew what a podcast was.
But by the time we went for a hike in the Oakland hills that December of 2012, the talk was not of embracing the journey, or even of taking turns, but surviving.
We’d returned from Manila in the middle of a recession. Nate had encouraged me to spend those months before and after our son was born writing—a decision I felt grateful for every single day. But after a year and a half of stretching ourselves thin, my efforts at finding an agent mirrored Nate’s search for a job: every time we’d get close enough to be sure it was finally going to happen, our hopes were dashed once again. Even the freelance gigs had dried up. So that evening, I decided to quit. I didn’t want to give up, but it was time for me to get a “real” job and leave writing to those who could afford it.
When we got home that evening my phone rang and I ignored it. Seconds later, Nate’s phone rang too.
He walked into the room where I was changing our son’s diaper and took the baby from my arms. He whispered, “I think you’re going to want to take this,” and handed me the phone.
The call was from Poets & Writers Magazine, to tell me I’d won an award I had forgotten I’d submitted for. The previous summer, my friend Carly had forwarded me the application a few days before it was due and urged me to submit my novel. There had been some scurrying around to print off the manuscript at a friend’s house because our printer was out of ink. We’d dropped off the thick envelope at a West Oakland post office that was open late. But it had been five months since I sent off that manuscript, five months since I thought about the possibility of winning—and then promptly put it out of my head.
The prize was an all-expense paid trip to New York City to meet with my dream list of authors, agents, and editors—an experience that one editor described as “Disneyland for writers.” That my submission had been chosen blind from hundreds felt like a miracle. It was the deus ex machina that would point my life’s trajectory back toward writing.
That week was one of the most magical experiences I’ve ever had. It changed me, to meet editors at places like the New Yorker, to share meals with my literary heroes. At the time, I was sure that the award would change everything, that finally all of my striving would amount to something.
Nearly a decade later, the reward wasn’t what I thought it would be—no book deals or dream agents signing me—but a more subtle victory: the permission to call myself a writer even though writing would likely never be profitable or convenient or easy.
I’ve spent the years since then learning to articulate why I keep choosing it. Today I’m talking with someone who understands that journey well.
Anne: My name is Anne Leigh Parrish. I am a writer in Olympia, Washington. I've been writing a very long time. I don't know if that's 35 years—I'd have to do the math on that—I think it is 35 years actually. I write fiction and poetry, also the occasional essay—but really it's fiction and poetry, sometimes twice in the same day.
Laura: This past year Anne became my official mentor in writing.
Last summer, on a lark, I applied for AWP’s Writer to Writer mentorship program after hearing Kirin Khan rave about the program and her mentor in our season 1 episode “Bent Toward Hope.” I’d known about the program for years, but never applied since I’m more often in the role of mentor than mentee.
But last year I started thinking about the program again as Nate and I were building our Kasama Collective training intensive, first as a beta program, then transitioning to a non-profit and applying for grants, and finally developing our curriculum into an online course that could provide training and mentorship for audio storytellers all over the globe.
Just last week we learned that we won the category for mentorship program at the PRNEWS Social Impact Awards. It’s a great honor to be recognized, and I hope it brings in grant funding so we can provide more scholarships for people to attend our program—but I know now that awards almost never change your life. The real reward of this work has been the relationships we’ve developed with our trainees. In the last month alone I’ve had the pleasure of recommending three of our graduates to potential employers, and then celebrating with them when they were hired as podcast producers. I love being a mentor and a coach. I love identifying in others all of the potential and ability and intention that will make them great if only they can see it too. If there was someone out there who might like my writing enough to guide me at this very different stage of my career, I wanted to receive that mentorship.
So at the last minute, I applied. I wrote in my application, “I am guessing I’m not your typical applicant. I’ve been writing for more than twenty years. But I value mentorship, and I’d love to work with someone who understands why I keep writing decade after decade even if the world doesn’t always reward me.”
I sent off my application and forgot about it—until I got the news that Anne Leigh Parrish, the astonishingly prolific author of ten books with two more coming out this year, had chosen to be my mentor. As soon as I heard her story, I understood why, because it reminds me a lot of my own.
Anne: I think a lot of writers will say that their origins go back quite deep. When I was maybe seven years old, I really wanted to do something artistic, something creative. I really loved reading. I loved language. And for about 10 years it went into training to be a classical pianist. I was quite dedicated at my piano practicing.
I see language almost musically. I'm sure that stems directly from the many years I spent working hard pulling apart classical music. How is it constructed? What's it made of?
I went to college and did not major in anything particularly artistic. I majored in economics of all wild and crazy things. But in college and later in graduate school, getting my masters in business, I realized what I really liked was the writing: the papers, the arguments on the page, how to do it, how to do it properly. By the time I'd gotten my degree and had a job as an economics consultant, I realized I want to write. That's what I want to do. So the age of 27 was very important to me, because that's when I decided I'm giving up this career track. Sorry! From that time forward, I've focused on writing.
Laura: Anne was about the age that I was when I decided to pursue writing full-time. But up until that point her training had been in music, economics, and business—not creative writing. So she wrote the way she’d practiced the piano: through repetition, by attention to detail, by tuning her ear to sound of the words on the page the way she had notes in a score.
Anne: I was writing only short stories. I did not attempt a novel—nothing long. But nonetheless, stories as we know, are very hard to write. I was working all the time, sending all the time.
I'm one of these people (that) I'm kind of hard-headed, and sometimes that's good—and sometimes it isn't. In this particular case, I began to write, and I wrote a short story, I put it in the mail, and I sent it out.
One’s early efforts are not always great. So this led to an enormous amount of frustration and disappointment, because I really was not ready to be putting anything in the mail. But I thought, well, why not? I'm going to do it. I've got nothing to lose. It's good to be hardheaded. It keeps you going. But you do sometimes have to stand back and look at your work as objectively as possible and say, “hmm, that wasn't the best use of your time.”
Creatively, it's very hard to be working and working, as we all know, and to be constantly getting rejected. And I did reach a point where I was incredibly frustrated.
And my mother, she said, “you know, this writing thing is really frustrating you. I can see that. Maybe what you ought to do is take a break and try something else for a while.” That was like waving a red flag in front of a bull. I thought, I'm not taking a break.
No. What I'm going to do is I'm going to lean on this project as hard as I can, and I'm going to continue to try to get published. And at the end of my life, maybe I won't have done it, but I will have spent my entire intellectual energy working on that, and nothing is going to get in the way.
Now on a daily basis, on a weekly basis, many things got in the way. That's the way it is. That's life. You know, we don't live in a vacuum. I wasn't a hermit. But I always went back to it, never away from it for long.
Laura: Like me, Anne had a partner who believed in her writing enough to support that dream—sometimes more so than she did. Anne told me, “John was more on board, I think, than I was. By that I mean, he didn’t struggle with the idea of it, even though the reality of being the sole breadwinner wasn’t always easy. He’s a lawyer, a fact which lessened my guilt somewhat. I figured it was easier for him to earn a decent living than say a bus driver might. In any case, I felt I’d put a big burden on him.
Five years into writing full-time, Anne became a mom, first to a son, then to a daughter. At that point, the decision to keep writing became a pragmatic one; the cost of outside childcare was high enough to more than justify her staying home with the kids and continuing to write.
We did a similar calculation in our household, which is how I ended up becoming a default stay-at-home mom for the better part of eight years. I didn’t fully understand that by staying home to write, I was putting myself in a weird no-man’s land of parenting. My stay-at-home mom friends didn’t understand why I rarely wanted to meet up for playdates. My working mom friends told me how lucky I was to “get” to stay at home with my kids. But the reality was that I was living two lives at once: doing the full-time job of raising children, while also trying to carve out as much time as I could to write.
Anne told me that the other families in their immediate circle were all two-income households. She said, “They didn’t look down on us, I don’t mean to suggest that, but it was something I was aware of, sometimes keenly, over the years.”
Anne and I both learned writing and parenting in tandem. They each presented restrictions and motivations in turns. From a pragmatic standpoint, it would have been easier to pick one, but I never wanted to, because often writing was the thing that gave me a way to work through the challenges of parenting. For Anne, writing gave her an outlet for facing her own painful family history.
Anne: My son was born in 1991. I had not published anything yet. He was home with me until he went to preschool at the age of two and a half. When he enrolled in preschool, I was about eight weeks away from having my second child. I was heavily pregnant. It had been a hard pregnancy. So I got him out of my hair, as it were, and I sat down and I worked on a new story. And I want to just take a moment and talk about the Genesis of that story.
Again, getting back to my mother, she had said, “maybe take a break.” I was not going to take a break. Then she said, “if you want something to write about, why don't you write about your crazy family? And the light bulb went off.
My parents divorced when I was 10. My father remarried almost at once with a woman who was a former student at Cornell. Long story short, I wrote about my crazy family—my parents getting divorced, my father taking up with this other woman—and I did that in that period of time between when my son enrolled in daycare every day and my daughter was born. And that was my first published story. It’s called “A Painful Shade of Blue.” And it took me nine years. And it appeared in The Virginia Quarterly Review. So that was a big deal.
Laura: The Virginia Quarterly Review has been around since 1925, and it’s among the most highly-respected literary journals out there. Peruse its pages and you’ll see names like Isabel Allende and Toni Morrison.
But getting published with the VQR didn’t change Anne’s life overnight. Six more years would pass before she got published again.
Anne: That again, took another frustratingly long interval of time
Laura: In the interim, life continued to throw her curveballs.
Anne: Then in 2000, my daughter developed type one diabetes. She became deathly ill, almost died, spent a night in the ICU. She was five, almost six. My son was eight. And I just really threw myself into the diabetes management. I had this binder and a spreadsheet and I was recording how many carbohydrates she was eating and what her insulin doses were. I think I've learned to become an incredible multi-tasker, because I'll work on something and then I'll do something else that has to be done. My time was very compromised. I was very distracted. And they were around all the time. But I was still writing. They went to school, so I wrote then. That's a big part of that story, is just the resolve. This is what I'm going to do. And to try to stay flexible creatively.
Laura: Part of that creative flexibility was learning to find her voice as a writer even as she was managing the increasing demands of parenting. That term, “finding your voice,” is really just another way of describing how a writer learns to write exactly like themselves: their particular way of pouring their lived experience into words and sentences and stories and characters. For Anne, it meant going deep inside her own story before she could find her way telling someone else’s.
Anne: I was writing about a woman who was married, who stayed home, who did not have children, who was deeply depressed and trying to figure out what to do with herself and confronting her anxieties. That makes a good story for about a page and a half.
My mentor at The Atlantic Monthly Michael Curtis never did publish me, but he was enormously helpful. And he did say very gently, “I've seen this situation before. I'm very familiar with these characters.” I thought, hmm. Time to shake up a snowball. Don't get stuck in the same rut. I was essentially writing the same story over and over again. That was the obsession, you know, writing about myself in that state. And then I said, “you know, I'm tired of being depressed. It's really boring.” I realized that being depressed, I was not going to be able to write—and I really wanted to write.
So I had to figure out why I was depressed, and to do that I had to figure out what was making me so angry about my life. Because I look at depression as anger that's kind of burrowed very deeply down in there. And I had a lot to be angry about. I did not have a wonderful growing up. I had a lot to work through, a lot of anger. But in doing that, I was able to write about other people who were angry about other things, and it wasn't about me anymore, and that was very, very freeing.
Laura: Six years after Anne published that first story, she finally got another one published. And another. And another. She’d always been consistent about submitting, but at last some unseen scale had tipped in her favor.
She won her first big contest with the Clackamas Literary Review in 2003. In 2007 and 2008, she won first place in another contest back to back years with American Short Fiction. In 2011, she published her first book, a short story collection called All the Roads that Lead From Home.
Michael Curtis, that editor at the Atlantic Monthly who had been a mentor to Anne, wrote this about All the Roads That Lead From Home,
“Anne Leigh Parrish has written a collection of stories that deserve a place on the shelf next to Raymond Carver, Tom Boyle, Richard Bausch, and other investigators of lives gone wrong. These are potent and artful stories, from a writer who warrants attentive reading.”
The collection grew out of Anne's own experience of loss as a child. But it was the work of being a parent herself that taught her the resilience and discipline to keep writing.
What I find striking in Anne’s story is that she reached some of her biggest writing milestones when parenting was most intense. That second short story was published a year after her daughter’s diagnosis, and she’s been publishing stories regularly ever since.
Anne: I think work is very, very therapeutic, because it's very distracting. You don't have a lot of time to fall into panic or anxiety. Those things happen, of course—it's inevitable—but your focus is off yourself. And your focus is really on top of the things that you can control and that you have to control. And over time I found that I worried less about things that I couldn't control. And looking back on it, I realized that the book publishing—short story collections, novels—that began in 2011 for me and continued on, coincided with a personal milestone, which was that my daughter had had diabetes for 10 or 11 years. She was then 16, 17. And she informed me that she was now going to take over her own management, thank you, that I did not need to hover and ask her to check her blood sugar. I did not need to ask her what her insulin doses were, that she was going to do that. And that was very freeing. I was like, “oh, okay, great! Here you go!” And I just passed it off to her. And she does very well with that. I think she is the poster child for how you manage this condition and don't have complications because you're so on top of it.
Laura: In 2014, Anne published her debut novel, What is Found, What is Lost, and it won the Independent Author Network’s 2015 Book of the Year Award for literary fiction. She was in her fifties when that book came out, and had been writing for decades. Even in the years before her first book came out, she’d received dozens of awards, honors, and accolades for her writing. Through those years of parenting and writing, she’d not only learned how to be a writer, but to have the patience to grow and evolve to the writer she’s become today.
Anne: I was in my thirties when I started publishing short stories, but then all that time went by because I didn't have anything book length together. I didn't think it was going to take me almost 30 years to write a novel, but of course in the beginning I had no interest in writing a novel. It just took a very long time.
Time went by. I got older. It was the realization of wanting more time, more space to dig in—that's what made me say. Okay. I think maybe you're ready for a novel now
I always looked upon my writing as a career—not as a hobby—and I think that's important. It gives you that legitimacy. Dad has a career. Mom has a career. And this is what I would tell aspiring writers to do. Don't dabble. Think about it as a career.
Laura: As her kids grew up, so did her literary career. But since she didn’t start publishing books until she was in her fifties, she found herself making different choices about that process.
Anne: At the time I had the book, I was taking sort of a jaundiced view of the whole agent process. I did query looking at an agent. I had some who were interested in the particular manuscript that I was shopping at the time, and asked for the full manuscript. Over time, the real problem where the agents were concerned—and I know there are very, very good ones out there who work incredibly hard—I was in my fifties at this point, when I began to publish book-length work.
I was 56 when my first novel came out. Many of the agents I was querying were very young, in their late twenties in their early thirties. I had been writing almost as long as they'd been around—and I just—I didn't want to do it. I didn't want another gatekeeper. I didn't want someone standing in my potential income stream.
Laura: So she decided to approach small presses that didn’t require her to have an agent to submit. She published books with three different presses, learning the business and what she wanted and needed in a publisher.
Anne: And then I found Unsolicited Press in 2016, and they have been wonderful to me. I stay with them because they're very supportive. They work hard for me. They work hard for their press. They're growing. They're bringing out more titles in 2022. It's very exciting. It's having them on my side that has been huge. Absolutely huge.
Finding an agent, not finding an agent—it really depends on what your publishing goals are. If you want to make money off of your royalties, you probably don't want to try to settle in with a small press because you probably will not make it. In royalty, some people might, I tend to doubt it.
So it really depends. Do you have financial goals? Then I would say, stick it out with the agent search. Attend some writers' conferences. Get out there where the agents are looking. So I think that's a personal choice that each writer has to make. But for me, I just landed with this wonderful small press, and until they kicked me out, I'm going to stay.
Laura: Over the years, Anne has become incredibly prolific, as if the older she gets, the more momentum she gains. She’s published ten books and has three more novels coming out in the next two years. When I spoke to her for this conversation, she’d just had her 63rd story accepted for publication.
She’s got the kind of career writers aspire to, and in the time we’ve worked together, she’d given me wise and thoughtful advice on both writing and life. But one of the things I’ve appreciated most about Anne is that she understands the value of writing outside of a capitalist framework, where all too often our public worth is determined by how little or how much money we make.
Anne: I don't really make a living at it. I publish. People like what I publish. I don't have to support myself off my proceeds or off my writing, because if I did that would have been something else that would have significantly influenced what I wrote, how I wrote it.
I would have gone about things very differently had there been a financial imperative. I have been very fortunate in that the only imperative has been an artistic one.
Laura: Anne is quick to define that term “writer” as anyone who writes, regardless of whether or not that writing is financially viable.
Anne told me, “I think writers need time to write, period. While many have to work and juggle writing ‘on the side,’ it’s never ideal.”
In a 2019 piece for Lithub, Stewart Sinclair tells the story of a student who is afraid to call herself a writer—even though writing is the thing she is desperate to do—because she knows how unlikely it is that she’ll make a living doing it. In 2019 the median pay for full-time writers was just $20,300.
Sinclair writes, “The crux of the matter concerns who does, and who does not, have the privilege of engaging in what are often referred to as labors of love.” He says that in our capitalist culture, “a failure to extract the maximum amount of capital out of our waking lives constitutes a failure of ambition.
It is not a system that rewards artists, or writers, or even mothers or caregivers or social workers or anyone . . . who saw a higher value in a calling of lower profitability—i.e., a labor of love.”
I think it’s worth pausing her a moment to consider that most of the writing out there is being created by people who aren’t making a living wage putting those words on the page.
Yes, there are grants and residencies and government funding for the arts—but to even get to the point where you’re eligible for such highly coveted support, you have to put in years or perhaps even decades of work to prove you deserve it. Applying for those opportunities takes a huge amount of time; when I applied for the Fulbright, it took me the better part of a year to put together the application.
Most writers will never get a grant or even publish a book, let alone make money off of it—but they keep writing anyway. The question for Anne, for me, for all of those writers, is why?
Years ago, I wrote an essay about motherhood and writing that I still haven’t published. It was the first piece of writing I sent to Anne when we started working together, and I think it’s taken me this long to finish it because for the past ten years, I’ve been working out this question of why I keep writing even when the cost of continuing is great, as it has been during these years of creating Shelter in Place. It’s a decision that hasn’t just affected me, but my entire family.
Writing has often kept me from my kids more than I’d like, and has shifted the domestic responsibilities to Nate more than he’d like. But it’s also helped me to understand my reasons for doing it, and provided a guide for where we’re headed next. It’s shown me the kind of mother I am, and the kind I want to be. Anne has been a mentor in this regard too, and her story gives me hope. Her kids are adults now. Their family is still close. Looking back at those early years of parenting—the years I’m in now—Anne knows she wasn’t the perfect parent, but she’s proud of who her kids have become.
Anne: I think that my children would tell you that I was a little too solicitous, a little too observant. I tried not to hover, but I do think they often felt that there was too much monitoring.
I came into motherhood with that, and I think I understand why. My mother was a professor of French literature at Cornell. After she and my father split, she went into university administration. She always worked, had her career. She was not a good mother. She abandoned me on a recurring basis. Showing up to pick somebody up at 3:30 at a friend's house—this is something that was very challenging for my mother to do. And this was a person who did not have substance abuse problems. It was nothing to do with that. I think her attitude was, you're fine, kid. I don't need to worry about you. You still have a pulse. That's kind of where she was. She died 20 years ago. Thank goodness. You know, life's been easier.
Compared to that, for me to be a good mother to my children I had a pretty low bar. I was a very organized person. Still am. Overcompensation to a certain extent. I had to learn how to curb my temper and not flip out because that's not good with young kids. That was a big learning curve. And I'm sure my kids would say, “yeah, yeah, yeah, you think you were so cool, calm, and collected. Let me tell you, you weren't always cool, calm, and collected.” But the fact that we are still in good touch, I realized that I didn't blow it too badly at any particular point. My husband's very level-headed and calm. He's not as mercurial as I am. Doesn't have that artistic temper than fighting against all the time. {laughs}
Laura: In many ways, my struggle as a mother is the opposite. I had a good mother. Raising kids was her labor of love, the thing she’d always wanted to do. I’m sure she didn’t always find it satisfying, but she was clear on her sense of purpose.
I’ve spent my entire adult life splitting the difference between writing and parenting—two labors of love with hidden costs. The struggle to find balance between them hasn’t gone away. But I’ve come to appreciate the way they can inform each other, how in writing I have an outlet to work through the more challenging parts of not just parenting, but life. And because I’ve been doing it for so long now, I find that it’s hard for me to imagine not writing. I write because it’s how I show up in the world. It’s given me my voice.
I’m turning 43 this week, and so I’m thinking a lot about what’s behind me and what’s ahead. One of the reasons that we’re taking a break from episodes this summer is that I’m finally giving myself a couple of months to finish the novel I’ve been chipping away at for the past few years. I haven’t given up on the agent search, but I’m also a very different writer than I was when I was submitting in my twenties and thirties. I don’t feel like an imposter anymore, because after writing and publishing nearly 200 narrative episodes, I no longer doubt my ability to tell a story. Even in this time of drastic transition, I feel at home in myself in a way that I never did before.
Anne said that publishing books has given her a similar gift.
Anne: I think it was the confidence of getting a book published, I think that was probably in many ways. More important because it was knowing I could do it.
I still get frustrated when something comes back and I'm rejected, but I get over it really, really fast. I just pull up my submissions spreadsheet and cross it off the list. That's all. And find another place to send it.
I just said, you know, if this is going to knock me over and make me unhappy for a day or longer, I'm going to have to get up to speed on this because this is what we do in this business. It's a lot of being told. No. So I'm going to have to find a way to learn, to live with it. And I'm just going to say, oh, well too bad. Cross it off. Find another place to say. Taking a practical approach because really you can't let it get to you. You can't function as a writer. And you never really lose all of that. Sensitivity is still a little bit of it chatting with my publisher we have a poetry book that's coming out and she is working on it now. And she said, I'm not quite done. She said, all I did was make some suggestions And I thought what didn't you like? Does that mean you didn't like it? And I said to myself, wait until she sends you the manuscript and then you can go through it and then you can flip out if you need to, but you probably aren't going to need to, but it's still there that impulse.
That just because a story is getting rejected doesn't mean it's not any. But you can only believe that once you have reached a certain level of ability and you've got your skillset and you're able to tell whatever story you want and exactly the way you want it. And you know, you're doing your job and you know, you're doing it well, and that takes a long time, but once, you know, you're there. Reminding yourself. Okay. If this editor didn't take that story, it's not because of the quality it's because they have a hangover or they've got a million other stories that they have to read through.
I've been on both sides of the desk. I have read for magazines, both poetry and fiction. So I know, you know, they're just some days you don't deal with it, which is not to say that the reasons I was rejected was because of any. On their part, but there are many, many things that go into it. So don't assume it's the quality.
Laura: One of the things that inspires me most about Anne is that she’s still evolving.
When my first book with unsolicited press came out, a short story collection called By the Wayside, I felt an evolution in my writing. It was more expansive, it was more literary. At the same time, it was also much more blunt and right down to brass tacks this is who I am as a writer. This is the groundwork that for the foreseeable future, I'm going to move forward from.
My writing is very literary by which I mean, I am always obsessed with language, word, choice, imagery, rhythm of the line. I have been known when reading a sentence allowed to tap my pencil, where the beats falling, all of this fed. Into poetry. Free verse poem. I began to publish right away. I've published 40 poems. I can't believe that's happened. seem to have something for that.
My publisher very generously when I showed her this poetry manuscript, she said, you know, I think maybe you were a poet all along. I loved her for saying that.
I think it was always in there waiting to come out. I thought, I need to try and see if I can, I want to grow more and more. I think I'm doing different things, digging a little more deeply and it's grateful fun. I am a poet and an a writer. That's the ground I'm standing on quite firmly.
I asked Anne to tell us a little bit about the writing that is coming. She’s got a novel coming out in October called An Open Door. It’s a story set in 1948, about the unspoken rules that kept women always in second place.
This book is a very fictionalized account, very loosely, and roughly based on the lives of my parents, when they were graduate students. At Harvard university in the late 1940s and the protagonist, her name is Edith Sloan. She was a graduate student, but the husband insisted that she gave up her graduate studies because. As an up-and-coming lawyer, he needs a certain kind of wife and a graduate student. Future professor is not that kind of wife. So it's all about the repression of women. And having a career freedoms were gained during the second world war, but the door's closing in 1948 in 1949.
She’s also got another poetry collection coming out next year called If the Sky Won’t Have Me and a novel called Summer Morning.
Even though I was pretty sure I knew the answer, I asked Anne the question I’ve been asking myself all of these years: why she keeps creating—even though it probably won’t make her rich or famous.
Anne: That has changed over time, right?
To discover what, you know, the old Flannery O'Connor quotation.
I stand by that, right? Because that's how you connect with the world. That's how you figure out what the world is all about. Right?
Because you love language,
you love the written word and how it rolls down the page. Right,
because it's fun
to be able to express what you want to express the way you want to do it .
I love dialogue. I love people, sassing each other. It's great fun. That's what keeps me going. I love to do that.
I have to create, you know, I just have to, cause that's where my intellect goes. In a way. It's problem solved. I need to solve problems, but I need to do it in a way that create something beautiful. That's very important.
When someone reads about. And says, you know, I really connected to this. I really understand what you were trying to do. When people you have never met, will never meet, read your book, write a review on good reads that's the good part when you connect with someone.
Laura: We’ve called this season of Shelter in Place in search of home, because in this time of contending with so much uncertainty about the future, we’ve often felt ungrounded and deeply aware of how quickly our sources of security can shift or disappear completely. Our family has experienced that shift often these past two years, so much so that it’s called into question all of the former ways of being and brought us to this work, which mostly hasn’t paid and certainly hasn’t made us rich or famous. But it’s given us a sense of home even when we were migrating across the country. It’s helped us redefine what home means.
Anne: I think we're all in search of a home. A place where we feel safe, a place where we can be ourselves grow, expand experiment with who we are intellectually and artistically. , I'm there and I've been there for awhile. Now. I feel at home in what I'm doing, I'm comfortable in the ability to keep trying to evolve. It is that shelter that I feel I'm in. That I think is home.
In his Lithub story, Stewart Sinclair recounts a conversation he had with a student who asked him if she had the right to write since she wasn’t wealthy or famous, and would likely be working other jobs all her life just to squeeze in those hours of putting sentences on the page. He told her, “we hear more often about the overnight successes and the six-figure book deals and the artistic geniuses than we do about the beautiful, quiet chapbook some author wrote that you would love if you ever got your hands on it. He told her, “There are more writers and artists like you and me than there are like Pablo Neruda and Stephen King. . . . that for many of us, writing is the main respite that we have from the job that we hate—and that even if we don’t become rich and famous or even just well-known in some obscure literary circle, we are entitled to the act of writing, the respite of writing, for the sake of it as an act and an escape in-and-of-itself.”
As we come to these final episodes of Shelter in Place, I’ve been thinking so much about the escape into life that these episodes have been, the way that writing has been a respite from the exhaustion and struggle of the past two years, a way to engage it that feels hopeful even on the hardest days.
If these episodes have meant something to you, we’d love to hear from you. We’re gathering voice memos for our season 3 finale episode, which is just two weeks away. If you’d like to submit a voice memo, head to our website shelterinplacepodcast.org. You’ll find directions on how to record and submit your voice memo, and you can also sign up for our newsletter, so we can keep in touch when this season is over and we’re working on the next project, which we’ll be revealing in our final episode.
