A Conversation with Gail Galloway Adams
September 7, 2007
Ann Claycomb, for Prick of the Spindle

As a student currently privileged to be part of Gail Galloway Adams’ graduate fiction workshop at West Virginia University (WVU), I can attest to her “passion for reading” (her words), for writing, and for teaching. Adams will be retiring from WVU at the end of this academic year, so before she left us I asked her to talk with me about what excites her interest, her indignation, and her imagination in the world of letters.

Adams believes deeply in the connectedness of writers to one another across space and time. In the writing craft classes she teaches and in the workshops she leads, Adams opens class by telling students what happened in writing historically on each day: writers were born, writers died, books were published, momentous events occurred that writers would later reshape in their work. And of course on any given day, readers are born, readers read, readers are themselves changed and shaped by writing. Adams is such a reader, and she urges her students to recognize and to feel the sense of community amongst writers, and between readers and writers. The opening phrase of many of her sentences is both connective and collective: “And so we . . .”

In person, Adams is a kinetic presence, as vivid as one of her own precisely realized characters. Her hair wants to escape its long braid, her eyes long to see beyond and around her glasses, her whole body bounces from her chair in response to the humor of a perfect phrase. Reading her own work aloud, she may begin speaking in the cadenced monotone that is the generally accepted “reading voice,” but soon slips into something more excited by the words she gets to use, the story she gets to tell. Each story has a pull to it that a listener can hear when Adams reads. She is not in a hurry to tell the story; it is not about to be lost. But the story demands to be told: of a memory that might not be a memory, of a family’s past; of two unlikely friends in a small Southern town; of a very unusual production of Dr. Faustus.

Adams’ first collection of short stories, The Purchase of Order, won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction when it was published in 1988. Recent work, which includes stories and essays, has appeared in The Kenyon Review, Story Quarterly, The Chattahoochee Review, and Gulf Coast. She is currently at work on a novel, at least one if not two short story collections, and a book of what she calls “doing the voices.”

 

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 AC: Really I think we’re just having a conversation more than anything else. I did read The Kenyon Review interview, and the Prick of the Spindle editor sent me a very interesting combination of exemplar interviews. She sent me the Joan Didion interview from the ‘70s where the interviewer actually died, and they sent Joan Didion the transcript and said ‘could you write this up?’ and so she did, and it’s very straightforward the way she transcribes it. And then she sent me one with Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night, which focuses almost exclusively on that book and the autistic boy’s voice. So I looked them over and I thought they were all very interesting, but then what I came back to was that I can’t escape the fact that, for me, you’re my teacher and I’m your student—and I sort of didn’t want to. So I only have five questions and if we diverge from those that’s okay. So my first question is—and it’s a question that I think every student you’ve ever taught wants to ask you—how do you find the time to read so much?

 

GGA: Lack of sleep! (Laughter) I do think that I probably am almost obsessive-compulsive about reading. I would say that it’s in some ways not even a positive at a certain point, because I do always read every night or I couldn’t go to sleep. If I have a book on tap (I’m reading now Breece D’J Pancake but I’m also reading A Farewell to Arms to my other class, but then I’m also reading Our Kind that [recent WVU MFA graduate] Penny Zang had given me, so that I have sort of three things going) and I know that certain ones I have to get in a certain time. And then the other one is the pleasure read. But I have to have a pleasure read sometime in a day. Usually that happens at night, and I usually go to bed between midnight and two. And those hours are when I’m usually pleasure reading.

For years we didn’t have a television. I just didn’t own one, and so what you did was read, and I grew up without television so I didn’t even notice its lack. Now if it’s on I will watch it, so I sometimes just don’t turn it on. But I think because I have to read so much for the job that the other half of it becomes an absolute personal necessity, to read for my own pleasure. But I would say someone like Sarah Pritchard who reads and I have another friend Norm Powers at Wildacres, he’s a reader beyond reading, to me he’s like the most incredible reader—any book that you mention, he will have read, and so I am tremendously envious. I also think there’s a matter of efficiency in reading. I’m not a speed reader […] but unless I’m teaching it, I don’t underline, I don’t asterisk. If I like it enough I will go back and do that but [...] you can’t waste time with the reading and just have to address it.

But what’s fallen off for me is review reading. I no longer get Publisher’s Weekly from my friend Chris Parker, who also is a voracious reader and the only person I know who, as an individual subscribes to Publisher’s Weekly. If ever I want to know anything, I don’t have to go to the library—I call her, she will have it. But that’s the first thing that I find falls away. I will turn to the table of contents and look down and if something looks interesting, then I’ll read it. Otherwise it goes in a great stack. I try to read the New Yorkers when they come in; same thing with The Atlantic [Monthly] …if I don’t get them read within the week, and then a second New Yorker comes in, I think okay, by the end of the month that will be the thing that will go. And sometimes my husband will be reading […] and he’ll say, ‘I want you to read this article,’ and I’ll make it a condition to read that.

But I think it also has a lot to do with family [...]. My father read until two days before his death. So I think that what it would be [is] a habit deeply ingrained, and now I’m actually not able to live without it. When my father was losing his sight [from] a diabetic retinopathy he said ‘I don’t know if I’m going to be able to do this…reading is so central to my life.’ So we did buy him a professional magnifier [and] then we got used to, in the last decade of his life, hearing the scritch scritch of his reading that was magnified on a screen this big (gestures) [...]. But he had to have reading. So I think we’re lucky when we read.

And of course writers have to read, which is one thing I know you understand—how sad that is, to see writers who aren’t readers. Because they’re writing then, to my mind, in a circular form over and over from what they’ve seen, or the few things that they’ve read. They haven’t read enough actually to expand beyond this small sort of formulaic. And yet there must be something, I think, internally—an inchoate urge to speak it in words even if you aren’t reading it in words. You want your words down on the page. But I’m constantly amazed, when I go places, people who want to write and you’ll say, 'have you read Shakespeare?' And they say, ‘how do you spell that?’ (Laughter) Someone sent me an email…she was all a-rant because she had gone on some blog where someone had posted that anyone can write the great American novel, and in it are several errors and [she couldn’t stand it…]. And she said ‘what was that you once said,’ because I had been doing workshops in Florida, and I said as far as I can tell, every retiree who moves to Florida has a walker and a laptop…immediately I get my walker, I get my laptop and there set out to write. Although I have to say, up until this point most of them were fairly well-read. If they go into writing it’s because they’ve had some sort of reading background. [...]

 

AC: I’m picking up on something you said about the writers who are reluctant to read, and especially the young writers, at least I’ve found. One of my mentees told me ‘I don’t read this, this, this or this’ so it’s all sort of excluded. But I definitely have felt the panic about reading—if I read something too exceptional, too wonderful, then I’m in a panic, like ‘why should I bother’ and then if I read something that’s just dreadful but got published and is on the bestseller list, then I feel like ‘why should I bother’…So I guess the smaller question there is, are you able to read uncritically—and you talk about pleasure reading, but are there books that you really are able to read and you’re enjoying it and you’re loving it, but you wouldn’t aspire to it or you wouldn’t say you admired it?

 

GGA: It’s interesting because I have a lot of friends who are readers, and they will recommend something to me and I’ll read it and I’ll admire it. I remember Red Ant House was one, and everyone was talking Red Ant House, and it was being taught by a couple of people and I read it and I thought ‘okay I like this story, I like that story.’ The rest of them, not only are they unmemorable, but in a way if you said ‘I only have this much time to read a collection would I have bothered to read those?’ If there was some kind of aura that they put out that I could then avoid them… So I was doing, in some ways, critical reading, because these were books that were being taught by people I admired and people that I respect for their choice of reading material, and yet when I started it just wasn’t for me. [...]

I always read Alice Munro with great pleasure, and just anything that she writes I’ll read. And then the other writer I do that with is Mark Helprin, he’s somewhat of a much more acquired taste. I think a lot of people don’t care for him, and he’s written some things—Refiner’s Fire, for example, which would be called in some ways adult fantasy or goes into a kind of a magic realism. [B]ut quite often if there’s something by him that I’m looking forward to, all those critical things kind of fall away. And both of those, Munro and Helprin I would say, always make me feel good at the end. I think I’m never going to reach that, but it doesn’t matter, it’s helped me with something.

The things I get dismayed with more are the ones where they’ve gotten great sort of hype, and so then I’m really eager to read them. And then I read them and I think ‘one story good, two story good…but the rest, not good.’ Then I’m dismayed in a way because I’ve read a lot of good stories from different people, and I’ve read a lot of collections from different people that don’t get published or they get in finals, and then I think 'well how is that?' And I understand there’s trends in publishing or it’s just the eye on the other end of the manuscript, but at the same time I think that can be a little dismaying.

Although I did cut out of The Dominion Post one of those wonderful stories that you think okay, eventually I have to believe it, I think all good writers do; eventually if it’s there, someone will recognize it and it will see print. This is a collection that just came out, a writer from Washington, D.C—[Kate Blackwell]—and this was a collection that was in the finals of the Flannery O’Connor [Award for Short Fiction] about six, seven years ago. And it comes down to the three judges. You know, they’ve all put forward their three [manuscripts], so there are nine manuscripts on the table out of which you choose two. And so there was a lot of tussling on that second one. The first one we all agreed on right away, but the second one—a lot of tussling. And this very collection was one of those that then lost out.

But I always kept thinking that it should see print and so it did. It did from an excellent press, a Southern Methodist University Consortium and they put out wonderful—Janet Peery, they were the first publishers of hers—names that then go on to write a little bit aslant, and the people there are recognizing it. So here is this beautiful collection—it’s changed its name, because I think it was called something like, I don’t want to say White Oleander because that’s that other one that was an Oprah book—something like White Peony. But now it’s called You Won’t Remember This, and the reviewer said 'this is taking a dare (laughter) to choose this as a title for a book.' [...]

I think the harder thing sometimes for me would be, because I do get The New Yorker and one of my friends says what they do with the [issues] of The New Yorker (and she’s somewhat cynical), is they take them and throw them down the stairway […] Because [one] month you can have a fabulous story and [then the next] you have something you wonder how in the world would ever have been chosen. And so I try to read them because I’m quite often astounded, just astounded.

 

AC: You mention Alice Munro so I wanted to segue into that. You do this thing in class, and you actually mention it in The Kenyon Review interview, assigning us some of these great short story writers—Chekhov, Cheever, Munro—and then suggesting that we try a model story. When I first heard this assignment I thought I was going to have a nervous breakdown. I just thought oh Lord, I can’t do it. This was before reading Chekhov last fall, and just thinking there’s no way—that it’s just going to paralyze me. But then, it’s now just a year later and I’ve got four stories in circulation. I’m not going to claim their quality, but they’re stories that I’m proud of, each one of which I can directly say ‘I wrote this as a Chekhov model, I wrote this as a Cheever model.’ And I know you do the exercise too. So I wondered if you could talk about why it works, when it seems like it wouldn’t.

 

GGA: It’s interesting that you mention those because I saved all the Chekhov models from last fall, because I sometimes will use those in other workshops that I do outside of academic frame workshops, because a lot of people would not have maybe read a Chekhov story, or maybe only once, or maybe not even have heard the name. But if we read then a small story in their packet and then give them opportunities, then I have all these wonderful student models. And they were, to me, an amazing array, because in the class last fall everyone wrote a model. There wasn’t a single person who wrote a critical response. They all tried models and they were extremely various.

And I’m not sure why it works. There’s something I’m teaching now—Hemingway, “Hills Like White Elephants,” “A Clean Well-Lighted Place”—and I’m using the exercise from Nicholas Delblanco’s book The Sincerest Form, which is the way that he structures all his beginning fiction classes: they read a Lorrie Moore story, they write in the second person, but they try to follow in some ways the cast of character. He has those specifications they have to use, the parameter is set up in her piece, and they have to fit themselves into it. It makes for more static models, I think. [...] The student samples from my undergraduates in workshop have been very instructive.

How it works for people who have already been writing a while I’m not sure, except that in a way it frees you from having the whole burden of the story coming out of you full-blown. I remember Sarah Pritchard visiting, and she brought in a model that everyone had done on an Alice Munro story. And we had another student in the class at the time—nontraditional—who modeled exactly an Alice Munro story in terms of event, and it was a pretty competent piece. And it didn’t actually transcend the model, but I think about [how] in some ways a certain work is done for you, and maybe psychically you can relax a little bit, and if it doesn’t work you can blame Chekhov (laughter)—you know, I just wasn’t able to get with his aesthetic, or… So maybe that’s one of the reasons why it does seem to work. [...]

But I guess that would be the one thing that I could think about. And then the other is the whole idea, oddly enough, of working collaboratively in writing, only there’s no one to talk back to you or not like your idea. I’m here trying to work with somebody real, and work as Ellery Queen (or that mother-daughter duo that my sister is always talking to me about, and I forget their name—they write sort of mysteries together) and I thought how interesting that would be to constantly—‘who’s going to do this chapter and do that chapter.’ But you would also have to be in some ways fighting a little bit about who’s going to take the lead, and it’s not collaborative like theatre really, where people […] each have their own kind of skill sets. These would be people each willing to subsume a writerly ego. But with great models then you’re working off of them and they can’t say you’re wrong. Maybe that’s it, I don’t know.

I did first ever do this in a workshop with D.M. Thomas and we had to work off a model of an Anne Sexton poem, the one that ends with "the rat's star" [from "With Mercy for the Greedy"]. And he had read that to us and then handed out a copy of it and then said, for each of us that was our assignment. And so for me it was interesting to take it back to the dorm and think what I was going to do. He asked us to adhere to certain words that were bolded […and] we were even given sort of shaped vocabularies. But it was fruitful. He was not a fun workshop director, I have to say that (laughter). But he was amazingly erudite and incredibly stimulating as an intellect. And I remember he used the word ‘mordant’ and I wrote it down right away. And the person next to me [...] reached over and wrote on my page ‘I love him already’ (laughter). The word as the aphrodisiac, right? We both had circled 'mordant' on a page.

 

AC: Actually that helps me understand why it works (laughter). I’ll have to do more of it. So then, I want to talk about your writing a little bit. Again in this same Kenyon Review interview, I was a little taken aback. The interviewer opens with a paragraph about your work, and at one point describes your writing as having at its center a sort of hard-edged beauty. I thought hard-edged? It wasn’t for me personally. I find your prose to be so lush and the descriptions often so—they’re softened, but as if with the glow of that nice light that makes everybody look younger.

 

GGA: Would that it were! (laughter) A little halo around my head now, right?

 

AC: But it feels like that’s what your writing does to whatever it is you’re writing about. Although I love "The Purchase of Order" itself, I think my favorite story right now in the collection (and of course it changes) is, I love Bisher—that’s a character. But I also love the mother and the son making the gingerbread houses. In any case, what it comes around to as a question is this sensibility that you can’t possibly write like that without observing like that. And I wonder about this—is there a weight to that sensibility? What I mean is do you sometimes feel like ‘Stop!’—like you want the details that you are taking in to be turned off?

 

GGA: That’s interesting because I was just reading a story that Mary Ann [Samyn, a poet and professor in the WVU MFA Program] had written, and I said to my husband that there was a line in there that I just immediately identified with, about the kind of a diffuse sense of, not anxiety really, but of racing thoughts, so that you always sort of have that—I’m not even sure how to articulate it—but kind of like a top of the head burn. But I’m not sure. It is interesting to me because when I’m saying to my students, especially the beginning ones […] to have their journals and what’s their favorite color? It just can’t be blue…even if it’s blue it can’t be blue (laughter). But then I find myself looking up and there’s that blue and there’s that blue. And maybe this goes back to having to do reading compulsively or obsessively. One of my students said ‘I’m passionate in my reading.’ She said ‘I don’t want to be called a compulsive reader, I want to be called passionate.’ But it also might be that that’s my way of turning that off. That somehow by reading it, it goes into somebody else’s thing.

I was, as a child, by myself a lot and so was, in a way, comfortable in my own company. And my parents, in the way of parents of old, pretty much left me alone. They adored me and loved me and thought I was just wonderful, but if I was gone for three or four hours they assumed I was amusing myself, as I was told often to do. [...] You think, well there’s this clinical term of ‘racing thought.’ But at the same time if you’re taking in detail—I do have and I’m not sure if it comes from childhood, but I have a really good memory. I am able to remember clothes and people’s faces and names, stories in particular. I can remember my students’ stories for decades. And I’m not sure why that is or where they go when I’m not actively engaged with them, but that’s something.

My father used to play the Kim game with us when we were children (and that’s from Kipling’s Kim when they were getting Kim to be a spy for them) and he was a little boy and they would fill the table with things and then cover it over and then pull it back, and my father liked that because he was kind of a memory-palace guy himself. So he could do huge, elaborate layouts and we loved to do that, we adored that kind of game. And I’ve always liked that kind of odd categorization that you do when you’re a person who classifies. In reading stories even, I’ll think ‘that would go with that would go with that would go with that,’ and ‘maybe they should read that,’ and you shape a curriculum for somebody’s reading while you’re reading a story. And sometimes I will have a story—mine or someone else’s—in my head, and I’m kind of fiddling with it. I think the critiquing process is really interesting. [...]

And I do want to say one thing that’s very interesting to me, and I have a sister in theatre [...] and she also is a great comedic talent, but she does riffs on things. You know, if you said something about this pile of oranges, the tangerine skins making you sick, very soon it would be like her intention would be engaged to make a skit out of it. And then pretty soon there would be two or three lines and kind of an improv, and she would say what she’s supposed to say. And I realize that in our family we do that all the time. Somebody throws the idea out on the table and somebody else goes and then you build on it, and then pretty soon people are speaking in accents—‘this orange peel make me happy! (laughter) And then it’s beginning to be this weird thing, and partly because our father was a little bit weird and our mother is a performer—we have her on videotape with oven mitts pretending to be a little crab-creature. I think part of that has to do with [the fact that] not only would you amuse yourself, but that you’d come up with ways to be amusing or entertaining to others .

 

AC: You’ve mentioned many of the writers whom you admire. But I’m going to be selfish in the extreme and ask you to talk a little bit about being a woman writer. One thing I have is a Joan Didion quote, and this is from the ‘70s, where she says

When I was starting to write—in the late ‘50s, early ‘60s—there was a kind of social tradition in which male novelists could operate. Hard drinkers, bad livers. Wives, wars, big fish, Africa, Paris, no second acts. A man who wrote novels had a role in the world, and he could play that role and do whatever he wanted behind it. A woman who wrote novels had no particular role. Women who wrote novels were quite often perceived as invalids. Carson McCullers, Jane Bowles. Flannery O’Connor, of course. Novels by women tended to be described, even by their publishers, as sensitive. (Didion 6)

And as I put this down I thought, that’s 37 years old, 40 years old almost at this point. But in one of your recent emails you mentioned this article that Natalie Sypolt [a recent WVU graduate] had sent you about the marketing of the sexy/hot author, and while I’m sure that Michael Chabon is in there as well, it makes me wonder…

 

GGA: It’s really sad, I think it’s really sad. But one of the things I think is so interesting about [...] the writers coming into their own at that time—and you begin then to think of the novelists that we’re following after—you had Grace Paley’s voice beginning to emerge, you had Joyce Carol Oates very young but beginning to emerge, and you think that in some way that Joyce Carol Oates sort of steps in and embraces this idea of the writer who will write. She doesn’t have children—writing is the sheer passion and focus.

I actually remember the first Alice Munro book that I read—I got it out of a library and thought good heavens— Lives of Girls and Women—and at the same time sort of beginning to read with another eye, having read for so many years in one way to taking the first Women’s Studies course ever offered at the University of Texas, […] and hearing the poems of Sylvia Plath, and then trying to make sense of some of the other writers […]. Reading Virginia Woolf and not as an impressionistic writer, beginning to read and go back and examine a lot of these writers. And then […] the thing that troubled me was not so much this ‘hot’ thing, but, one woman said ‘whatever attention you can get to make your books be read…’ But I think I’m not so sure that that is good, because then the people who read your books for [those] reasons might be the ones who would never buy the second book, and so you’re not building up a readership that would sustain.

But I remember reading once [something that] referred to the ‘King Davids,’ and it was Dave Eggers, David Foster Wallace, and I was just so taken aback by this, that this kind of royalty could be conferred upon these guys so early. And then I began to think of a lot of the writers that I had read and loved as part of this other kind of great intellectual tradition—you know, the Jewish intellectuals in America coming out of Alfred Kazin and A Walker in the City and how many of those are not read at all even today, and sort of what happens to traditions. And so then I began to think of women writers that sustain careers and I think, well Alice Munro and Margaret Atwood are both Canadian, and so are maybe out of this celebrity cult of [the] writer in America.

And I was always pulled to British writers, contemporary writers—Darrell Bainbridge I like very much, Pat Barker I teach all the time. And I’ve read Fay Weldon a lot; I read Margaret Drabble early on and I kept thinking well, was I being pulled to them more than American writers who are writing, because of some kind of other need? [...] I read Iris Murdoch and I thought, 'well here’s someone who’s a philosopher and a novelist,' and it seems that that’s absolutely okay. And I remember one time I got a love for Enid Starkey—a strange scholar as I realize now, and a hideously conservative person—but I liked the idea that she was an Oxford don and she could write these novels. And I liked Mavis Gallant and Penelope Lively, and all of these people who seemed that you wrote and you did something else and it was absolutely a given that you would go on and do this; where maybe it seemed it was harder to be a writer in America as a woman. Because then there were all these other kind of expectations that you weren’t going to fulfill.

I really admire Jean Stafford—she was a writer I loved and then her life sort of went derailed because of the alcohol or breakdown, who knows. But I love Boston Adventure, I loved that she had this wonderful career. She was in 1944 really going to be one of the breakout writers and then it didn’t happen. And I remember reading an appreciation of her by Maureen Howard—another writer I really like still writing today—and sort of seeing how this early promise somehow hadn’t come to fruition, and the biography that was being written about her was in some ways so mean, as it sort of took on her personal life. But you know, I think she was married to Robert Lowell, and so that in itself was this kind of subsumption. But when you think of it I see Grace Paley, but most people would say, well this was a small output. And I think she was even criticized by Mailer for having too much activism, but then Mailer would be one of those that I think no one could have thought, when I was way back in my Master’s degree, wouldn’t be being taught this very day because he was such a huge figure on a cultural theme.

But when I think of, you know, here’s Joan Didion writing, but who teaches Joan Didion? I mentioned Maureen Howard, she’s still alive—who teaches her? My American Studies dissertation would have been looking at depictions of mother and daughter in selected American fiction […] but Maureen Howard was one that I fought with my committee about, because they felt she wasn’t august enough a figure. And then I remember Rosellen Brown was coming on the scene at the time and had The Autobiography of My Mother and then the factor there is, usually the grandchild is sacrificed so that the mother and daughter can actually affect their relationship, you know—somehow the next generation will be sick or they’ll die or something, a miscarriage—so then mother and daughter can be brought together over the death of this child. But it was clear that that topic was going to be okay in some ways because it dealt with mother-daughter relationships, so that they’re for women writers, and that’s still your tried and true territory. I don’t know, but when I think about young women writers today—and that that was one of the reasons, when I was reading this book that Natalie Sypolt had recommended, [The School for Girls Raised by Wolves] I thought in some ways it’s a very young collection to me. Interesting in its inventiveness of language but all the stories are slightly coming of age—she’s young, 24, 25—but they don’t yet face, in some ways, the next range of writing. And then I try to think well, who would I say does that now? That would be interesting to me.

I know for a while, I thought Allegra Goodman because I enjoy her work a lot. And then for a while I thought Deborah Eisenberg, and I even thought about teaching her this year, you know [The Stories (So Far) of Deborah Eisenberg]. But there’s something very bleakly brutal about her vision. And so to me it’s a beautiful story sometimes, but at the end I just feel sort of wiped out by it rather than elevated by it. And it doesn’t even have to be happy to elevate me, but there’s something drained from me when I read it. And I know Kate Braverman is usually in the forefront but she’s not a writer I’ve ever been able to feel an affinity with. But it’s clear to me that even with the hot and sexy guys—now the women are doing the lingerie ads but the guys are set to look like the intelligent nerds. They’re the ones who can wear glasses and it’s oh, he’s smart, cute and sexy and over there it’s like look, she has on a lacy bra. […] This one writer said there’s something to that fiction and I’m sort of wondering, why then she is allowing herself to be presented that way? That youth thing is interesting though, because you think of Carson McCullers and Truman Capote—so young.

 

AC: I almost hesitate to ask the next question, but you opened the door for it, so I’ll ask. Because you talked about your project, being interested in looking at mother-daughter relationships in some American fiction, and having just read this one interview where you talk about how much you enjoyed staying home with [your son] when he was little and you were thinking a lot about writing and—again this is a very selfish question—but I feel like your answers shed a lot of light on your own experiences as well as being helpful for other writers. And then Alice Munro, in one of the interviews you passed around last year, talks about being a B-, maybe a B+ mother when her children were young…obviously there are plenty of fathers who are writers and yet you don’t hear about that being a particular source of tension driving them into therapy.

 

GGA: I never did have children early on. We were married almost seventeen years before we had a child, so that I was ready to stay home with a child. There’s an interesting article—I think it did appear in The New York Times—Ursula LeGuin’s “The Hand that Rocks the Cradle Writes the Book.” I think she had five or six kids and in a way, one of those Victorian phenomena, where you have those people who are writing a million books on one hand and taking care of a family of eighteen on the other. And so I was interested in how she found time in her life, and I think reading about Shirley Jackson’s life—you know, four kids—had to take a nap every afternoon, had to have time for her writing, and would be considered like a C- mother, you know, people even taking her children and bathing them and washing their hair, which insulted her, but at the same time I guess that they were grubby-looking little kids. Her children have really wonderful memories of her, so you think that’s what counts.

But it’s interesting to me to think what does happen with somebody staying home, and I have plenty of friends who have little kids and what does happen—they have to become really, in a way, organized with their work and sort of setting time aside. And then I think they have to have a certain kind of selfishness, that I really do think is absolutely essential, if not for writing, for just organizing your own sanity. Because it’s lovely to be home with your child, but even when I was home with my child, I did other things too to keep my foot in the land of the living. And when I see friends of mine who have little kids and how they then are attempting to organize, most of them have either some kind of nanny situation and/or they have some kind of preschool/playschool situation that is absolutely inviolate, and it’s every day—it’s not just Wonderful Wednesday or Serendipitous Tuesday. They manage to have them every day.

[…] But you know, it seems to me that most things are organized around if you’re going to have the kids at home; they’re going to be with the mother, even if the father is tremendously supportive and there all the time. And my husband was a wonderful person in that way, and most of the people I know who have kids have those kind of marriages. Partly out of my generation is when people began to look very carefully at that, but still in the end the bulk of it falls on one person, and it’s usually the mother. And if the mother has aspirations for writing or sculpture or some life outside of this wonderful small circle, I think that there’s a certain—I don’t want to say brutal selfishness, but sometimes it does [feel that way] when the little arms are clinging round the neck or [when there’s] the little soft whispers at the door. […]

 

AC: And so my last question is, you are retiring at the end of this year, and I wanted to know what you are most excited about working on?

 

GGA: For years, or for some time, I have been [writing] little pieces, sketches, and vignettes in my particular passion which is WWI—the whole kind of literary landscape between about 1910 and 1924. I’m just really interested in that. At one time I actually had a significant portion of it done in outline form, and two or three sort of scene vignettes that I knew that I wanted to work on [...]. I have all these files of, not only the stuff that I’ve taught historically, but I also was just sort of counting out for myself how many books have come out on WWI since I got this idea. And so far no one has used this angle, because it’s still a war that’s wide open, but I worried because a book was coming out of Canada called The Deafening, and it came out and won all kinds of prizes and everything. And it has to do with the education of the deaf in Canada, and the war in the trenches, and sort of setting up these kind of wonderful contrasts, so when I saw that I got really nervous—I thought ‘oh no,’ but again I read it and I thought, ‘okay we’ve sidestepped.’ But it’s something I’m engaged in—I like the people in my novel, I like the woman in the novel, and I like her husband who dies young, but I like her older husband, and—I just like them. And so I’ll be eager to get back to that.

Once I had read a little excerpt of it at a workshop and someone asked me about it, and I realized it was one of those things that sustains my interest, and I think you have to write to sustain your interests. The other thing is that I probably have enough short stories now to have another collection, or even two. I’ve never put them together; they’ve fallen a certain way […] and so I’d like to sort of put them together, see what’s still strong. Especially the ones that were published right after the first collection came out. I had a spate of other things and should have then seized my day, but didn’t, and so I’d like to go back and see how some of those hold up. I had a request for one of them for an anthology that was going to be around stories about eating [disorders and body image,] and whether or not that’ll ever come off who knows—you just say oh sure I’ll give you permission, you can use it, and hope that it happens. So I’d like to go back. Some of them I’m fond of, some of them when I re-meet them I think ‘huh, that’s not so pretty…’ But I’d like to get that shaped and then maybe try to place another collection.

Then I do a bunch of whole little…tiny pieces that I would just call, I’m not even sure… one time I was calling them ‘doing the voices.’ And it’s that British kind of send-up where you do imitations of things. And I had a lot of them, some came from a specific exercise, others came from different prompts, but they seem to me to be falling into a kind of— almost like if you were doing onstage a one-person monologue, and it’s a shifting from character to character. […] And then I have been approached by another small press because [...] I have some weird little prompts, that I’m not even sure exactly what they are—they’re very charged poetically. And this is a press that specializes in poetry publications, but I don’t consider them poetry. And he said would I mind sending them, and I thought 'well I shouldn’t mind sending them—if he thinks they’re poems then maybe they’ll be poems.' So I have a lot of projects like that, but I’d like to have the time to get back to the novel. I have its timeline—I used to teach history on the college level, so I know where they are in history. And so I’d like to do that just because I would have the time to kind of sustain that.

I am, as I told you before, going to help my mom get her story together, and she has a very inventive idea. I have no idea if it would be possible, of her story going and my father’s story going—and then kind of like a triptych would be our family going right here in the middle, and I guess you could flip it over or something (laughter). And she remembers clothes, she has such a memory for clothes so we were thinking about doing it like that [Ilene Beckerman] book [Love, Loss and What I Wore] and then instead of the paintings, we would have the photographs of my mother. And then I could describe them, even with color or something. And she could tell the story of the outfit, and in that way kind of organize.

And then I think there are a couple of stories that I started that were [in] fits and starts, but they have something to them, I know that. I started one story about this time last year—it’s called “Corporal Johnson’s Parade”—but I’m not happy now with how it ends. The other night I was thinking about the baby’s name, Burpsy (his nickname)—if Burpsy did something else in the tub... So that’s a story that I know I’m engaged with. I had a friend who was a painter who retired from teaching, and she said time widened out marvelously, and so that’s what I’m looking forward to, is that kind of time widening out. Although I do know the nature of my personality is like my father’s—I do have to have contact in a larger world than myself so that [I] don’t get too self-absorbed […] So I can amuse myself for hours but then I need to also have the world.

And then I intend to work with children from birth to three. I don’t know how. But I used to work in Head Start, I have worked with a CASA organization before, and so I’ll probably do something in that—with a children’s home, or with Boys and Girls Club. I thought about having a Brownie troop and my mother said no, she didn’t want a whole bunch of Brownies out getting drowned in the stock ponds or something (laughter)…but I thought it would be fun.

You think about your time as limited in some ways—you’re within twenty years of your demographic. And on the other hand I think of Harriet Doerr writing Stones for Ibarra beginning when she was 73, 74, and so I don’t worry. I will continue to do workshops, and I hope always to kind of keep my hand in that. But for my writing, I’d like to have that lovely time for the novel. And I have another friend who’s actually doing research in the same area, but she’s tying in to the San Francisco earthquake. We trade back and forth, kind of talking about where research is taking us. I heard from another writer who does historical novels—she did the one on the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, and I’m sorry, her name escapes me—and I had written her in a matter of technical stuff, and she said her problem is she had to make herself stop researching. It was just so engaging, you know, she could have just collected notes forever. And so that’s one thing I have to kind of pull myself up with. I have a drawer full of stuff—this will be the third time I’ve taught WWI, Literary History and landscape—how much more do I need? Meanwhile in the year since I’ve taught that last one, three more books have come out, and I think at what point do I say either write it now…?

 

An excerpt from Gail Galloway Adams' short story "Alice Remembers":

Here is a snapshot of my sister at age two sitting on a tabletop. She is barely bigger than the birthday cake at which she claps her hands. Shoulders hunched around baby fat cheeks, sash of her smocked dress undone, she is frozen in expectancy. She has not yet blown out the birthday candles and the camera has caught their gleam; they shimmer, strange fireflies hovering above the candy roses that border the edge of her sweet. Her hairline remains the same, as though an artist penciled a delicate line around her ears, then gathered up fine hair into a tail that in this picture arches like the ink strokes in a Chinese print—it could spell waterfall. (89-90)

 

 

(Adams, Gail. “ Alice Remembers.” The Purchase of Order. University of Georgia Press: Athens, 1988, 88-95.)

Didion, Joan with Linda Kuehl. “The Art of Fiction No. 71: Joan Didion.” Interview. The Paris Review, 74 (Fall-Winter 1978), 1-22. 18 Sep. 2007. <http://www.parisreview.com/media/3439_DIDION.pdf>