One of the many wonderful things about having a blog that focuses on books is that I get to meet through email like-minded people; people who love books and reading, and also people who love writing. One of the fine people that I have chatted with via email is the author and poet Terri Brown-Davidson, who has recently published her novel Marie, Marie: Hold On Tight.
Since I love to review books, and I love to talk to writers, I thought I would start a new category, entitled Reviews and Interviews. It will contain reviews and/or recommendations of recent reads, as well as interviews with authors who want to talk with me. As much as I enjoy discussing the subject of author's books, being the nosey person that I am, I am even that much more interested in the more personal aspects of a writer's life.
PS:Can you discuss your educational and professional background?
TBD:I’m trained as a scholar, with the usual plethora of degrees to mark me as such: Ph.D., M.F.A., M.A. And I was the Chancellor’s Doctoral Fellow (a mark of distinction among grad students) at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln while I was earning my Ph.D. there. But I’ve always considered myself a renegade within academia. Cutting-edge ideas attract me more than sound scholarship principles, and I prefer artistic pursuits—creativity, per se—to academic ones. That’s why working at Gotham Writers’ Workshop (www.writingclasses.com) is such a perfect fit for me. I’m on both the fiction and poetry faculty there, which helps me take advantage of my own cross-genre tendencies. But, more importantly, the students at GWW are the most serious I’ve ever worked with, definitely the highest caliber as well. I view GWW as a creative form of academia, one that can exploit my own tendency—and the students’—for risk-taking in art, which is wonderful and difficult to find. Academia isn’t risky, no matter how you look at it. I remember when I was teaching a sophomore-level fiction-writing class at UNL. Of course, that’s my metier (teaching creative writing), and that was one of the first times I taught a creative writing course at UNL, and I was understandably excited. But I had almost all football players enroll in that class, and—not only were they not excited about the class—but they were also all taking it as an elective and didn’t actually understand what they’d signed up for (I’m not denigrating university athletes, btw; they’re just a different breed altogether from artists). So, as I was explaining the syllabus to these young gentlemen, I was expecting excited interjections about the possibilities of the course…and received none. Finally, one young man looked up at me and said, “You mean…we’re supposed to ‘lie’ in this course?” On the basis of this experience, all I can do is reassure you that it’s the most satisfying thing in the world for artists to have the opportunity to work with other artists. Minds in synchronicity, you understand.
PS:What attracted you to writing when you were young?
TBD:I think that the attraction was always there though I was never particularly conscious of it. Even now, I don’t understand why writing picked me as opposed to painting, for example; I also drew a lot while I was young. One hesitates to say it, but I suppose I had a gift for the tall-tale (a euphemism, yes) when I was a girl that predisposed me to fiction writing. One whopper from my youth involved my telling my first grade teacher that my mother had just had a baby girl (she hadn’t; she wasn’t even pregnant) and that the days-old child had tossed a bowl of chicken-noodle soup at my head and was gleefully riding a bicycle sans training wheels! An imagination that’s out of control has to be put to good use, and fiction-writing is a pragmatic and satisfying excuse for those with a propensity to inhabit other worlds.
Plus, admittedly, the creative act gives me a high that can’t be replicated in any other way. When I’m inhabiting a character, that thrill is, I imagine, akin to that an actor experiences. I’m besotted at the possibility of inhabiting other lives, shedding the own tight confines of my skin, and fiction offers me this possibility.
PS:Can you recall what family and friends thought of your artistic pursuits, especially of your desire to write? Did they encourage you?
TBD:They thought it was essentially “natural,” I suppose. I come from a long line of creative types: my mother was a pianist, my father sketched and did various types of designs, my brother is a painter/photographer/filmmaker. Now, my husband is a fiction writer, and my daughter (four years old) loves to draw. There were always stacks of books around my house when I was a child, and my parents didn’t encourage me to read “baby books” when I was young but anything that struck my fancy. I read WAR AND PEACE in the third grade, gave an oral book report on it, and mispronounced probably every name in the novel (I had the teacher in stitches, as I recall). I read IN COLD BLOOD when I was twelve years old, and it probably reinforced my natural tendency toward darkness as a fiction writer: though it was a nonfiction novel and thus a rare beast indeed, I admired its marvelous complexity as well as its ability to extend empathy toward those who seem singularly undeserving, in a humanistic sense: Dick and Perry are rendered with the same sensitivity and sense of humanity as the Clutter family (whom they murder), and that definitely captured my attention. But creativity was always an essential part of my life. And now—to continue tendencies that emerged when I was young—my best friend, Season Harper-Fox, is a talented poet and fiction writer and also a faculty member, as I am, at Gotham Writers’ Workshop.
PS:What was your first publication in a literary magazine?
TBD:My first publication was in a tiny rag called Up Against the Wall, Mother. The editor, Lee-lee Schlegel, accepted a poem, “To a Mannequin.” The magazine had cheap graphics and was saddle-stapled, and a lot of the work in it was awful, but I didn’t care: I was thrilled. I still remember the acceptance letter; Lee-lee had drawn a smiley face on it on this tiny printed acceptance slip. Hey—it worked for me!
PS:What was it like working with that editor?
TBD:Well, she was the first editor I’d ever encountered, and she was very hospitable to my work, so that was a psychological boost. To tell you the truth, this was so many years ago that I have some trouble remembering exactly what that first publication “felt like” (it was more than twenty years ago, I think). But there was the usual general euphoria. My first big publication wouldn’t come until a few years later, when TriQuarterly accepted a poem.
PS:What drove you to publish work in so many literary magazines?
TBD:It feels like the next step to me, seeing my work in print. It formalizes or makes public the more private act of writing. It’s as much sharing the work with myself (as an impetus) as sharing it with an audience, in some strange respect. Plus, there’s something delicious about “framing” your hard work in the gorgeous graphics of a well-mounted, well-produced litmag.
PS:What publication are you proudest of?
TBD:If you’re not referring to book publication, I’d have to say my appearance in TriQuarterly New Writers, which was very important for me and my work. And, apart from book publication (which is always the most significant), my chapbook rag Men, which won the first The Ledge Competition and was published to excellent reviews.
PS:What was the genesis for your novel?
TBD:Marie, Marie arose from one hour in my Modern American and British poetry class at UNL, when we were all reading The Wasteland together. There’s the passage that’s cited in the book which contains the figure of Marie. When I read that passage in class, I recalled that some Eliot scholar had said that the “Marie passage” was the least-discussed in The Wasteland. That meant, for me, that Marie was the “least interesting” character in the poem for a number of readers, and that intrigued me: it turned her into an instant underdog, you might say.
PS:Did you base Marie, the main character, on experience, observation, or a combination?
TBD:I had her look like Frida Kahlo in that beautiful/homely way Kahlo had (no mustache, though, and no unibrow!). Apart from that, the character arrived in my mind; I didn’t have to look for her; she came to me fully formed.
PS:Tell me about your current projects, if any.
TBD:I’ve just finished a novel on Diane Arbus and now I’m writing many new short stories and poems: this week I’m working on four new short stories, which is eminently satisfying.
Terri Brown-Davidson's novel Marie, Marie: Hold On Tight is published by LitPot Press.
