Ann Putnam holds a PhD in literature from the University of Washington. She teaches creative writing and gender 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 including 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 latest work is a memoir, Full Moon at Noontide: A Daughter’s Last Goodbye. Information about her book and how to order it can be found on her website: annputnam.com.
Q: It’s rare today to find an author who does nothing but write for a living. Do you have a ‘real’ job other than writing, and if so, what is it? What are some other jobs you’ve had in your life? Have they influenced/inspired your writing?
Boy, that’s the question of the day. Do you work at the phone company and come home to a beckoning though slightly schizophrenic life where you have nothing but your own work before you? Or do you work with language and words all day and come home with a briefcase full of the words of others to be read and edited? For better or worse, I’ve chosen the latter. My day job, which is also a calling, is teaching. I’m a professor at a small liberal arts college. Some days I am so full of language I can hardly read the newspaper let alone sit down at my computer and find the way to words of my own. Other days the life of the teacher nourishes my life as a writer just as my life as a writer enriches my life as a teacher. Right now, at semester’s end, with a huge stack of finals, portfolios, and notebooks to grade, I’m looking longingly at a day job I could leave behind and give me hours of my own work.
Q: What compelled you to write your first book?
Though I have written other works, I’d like to respond to this question as it applies to the work closest at hand, my memoir about losing my father, Full Moon at Noontide: A Daughters Last Goodbye. It’s not an easy question to answer, as 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. What interest might there be 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.
Q: Have you always wanted to be a writer?
Yes yes yes. As a kid, my favorite card game was AUTHORS. My first work was a play written with my best friend, titled “Jody and Caroline Go Berry Picking,” where Jody is bitten by a rattlesnake and Caroline runs to safety and saves her. My friend and I are both sure that each of us is the brave Caroline who risks life and limb to save Jody, and the other is Jody, who has little to do but lie on the ground moaning. My next work was a short story called “Heart Attack on Broadway,” which blended my two great dreams—to be a writer and to be a famous Broadway musical comedy star. And the rest is history.
Q: Tell us briefly about your book.
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 passing to the other, of what happened along the way, of what it means to lose the other who is also oneself. It takes the reader through the gauntlet of the health care system with all the attendant comedies and sorrows, joys and terrors of such things.
Q: What are you working on at the moment?
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.
Q: How did you feel the day you held the copy of your first book in your hands?
Oh yes! I was at a conference for a reading from my soon-to-be-published memoir, and I had packed my reading, printed out, two copies—one in my suitcase, one in my purse, just in
case the airlines lost my suitcase. It had been a stack of pages for so long, draft after draft. When I checked into the hotel, the manager said, “There’s a package for you.” I took it to my room to open it. And there it was. So beautiful, so shiny and new. And there was my father’s photograph on the cover—a New England seascape, a virtual painting with light and shadow. I ran my hand over that cover and felt my father’s presence and knew he would be so proud
Q: What type of music, if any, do you listen to while you write? Do you need the noise or the silence?
This is a wonderful question: one I love to answer and one I love to ask. I can’t seem to write at all without music. It can’t be anything I can hum along to or with lyrics that might spin around in my head. So it’s mostly jazz and classical (Ravel and Debussy especially). Lately, I’ve discovered soundtracks. When I’m writing fiction I often find a soundtrack that I associate with this character or that, and when I put on his/her “music,” it takes me right to the core of that character in a very quick and deep way. Why some music becomes identified in this way is a mystery. For example, the soundtrack for The English Patient has become identified in my mind with Eugenie, a character in a novel I’m working on. One whole chapter came from the track where Fred Astaire sings, “I’m in Heaven.” I don’t try to analyze; I just give thanks! I try to use soundtracks from movies I haven’t seen so that I don’t have to compete with cinematic images that might float across my mind. I look to the lists of soundtracks nominated for SAG awards and Academy Awards as a place to start.
Q: How do you balance out the writer’s life and the rest of life? Do you get up early? Stay up late? Ignore friends and family for certain periods of time?
This is a great question. I teach a course at my university called “Survey of Literature by Women,” and it takes all semester to even begin to answer that one. How does a woman have her work in the world, work her soul must have, and also love? Fortunately women are very good I find at being able to do two things at once. But it is often wrenching. A person can’t be in two places at once. But you can sit through your daughter’s day long gymnastic meet with a notebook in hand, or a laptop on the bleachers beside you and know immediately, intuitively, when to snap to attention, when to applaud and smile and nod.
I think I don’t have very many friends as a result of this double life. Or maybe it’s a triple life.
Q: What is your writing space like? Do you have a designated space? What does it look like? On the couch, laptop, desk? Music? Lighting? Typing? Handwriting?
This is such a good question too, because I think writers can get very superstitious about such things and attach a certain kind of mystery to these little things. Since I did not have a “room of my own” for many years I got in the habit of taking my work everywhere. I’d be on a bike ride with my family and pull over to jot down an idea or two. Stoplights have been wonderful for me. I’ve written on car registration forms, grocery receipts, anything at hand.
Right now, I mostly compose at the computer. But if I need to slow things down and want a lyrical turn of phrase or find myself just stopped, I’ll go to handwriting for a little free write or do a fast cluster. I like to jot things down non-linearly, so that the ideas don’t assume a false structure or hierarchy.
I did use my beautiful study downstairs, which I called “My Sanctuary,” for a number of years. My husband died a year ago in the summer. And he was so ill that I moved everything upstairs to this little cramped table in the dining room, so I could be close to him when I was working. Now I can’t get moved back downstairs and I don’t really quite know why. But it’s waiting for me one fine day.
Q: It’s one thing to write a book and another to edit it. How do you feel about the editing process? What was it like to edit your book?
Glorious. Wrenching. Agonizing. Transcendent.
Q: Now that you are a published author, does it feel differently than you had imagined?
Yes and no. Everything has changed and nothing has changed. The blank page is still the blank page. The book in my hand will always be the book in my hand.
Use this space to tell us more about who you. Anything you want your readers to know. Include information on where to find your books, any blogs you may have, or how a reader can learn more about you and writing.
I have three children, two sons and a daughter, but have no pets, after years of living with many dogs, birds, an occasional lizard and two inherited white rats. I would say I have dog envy, but cannot bring myself to start over. The death of the dog is in my book. I have 8 unattractive houseplants I keep forgetting to water, which may in part explain their unattractiveness. I dance, sing in a chorale and can twirl batons upon request, if given a good stretch of time to practice—all of which sooner or later finds its way into my writing, one way or another.
My book can be ordered at any bookstore, through Amazon, and directly from the distributor at www.tamupress.com or by phone: 1-800-826-8911. I have a website for my book, annputnam.com which includes reviews and radio interviews and my bio. I have a Facebook page also, as well as a website through my University: www.ups.edu/faculty/aputnam.html
