Anne Sanow is the author of the story collection Triple Time, winner of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize and the PEN/New England Award for Fiction. Her work has been published in Dossier, the Kenyon Review, the Chicago Tribune, and elsewhere, and her awards include fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the MacDowell Colony, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She currently teaches at the University of Southern Mississippi's Center for Writers.
Her story, The House in the Woods, appeared in Issue Seventy of The Collagist.
Here, she speaks with interviewer Dana Diehl about a smallpox cemetery, the Salem witch trials, and nonconventional narratives.
This piece feels very image driven. It’s full of lovely language such as this, “Leaves spiral down gently, quilting each mound in gold and green and bronze and crimson. The house breathes, the bower pulses.” Is there a particular image or phrase that this story was born from?
There is an image—a particular place—that inspired this story: the smallpox cemetery in Provincetown, Massachusetts, which is difficult to find and where I really did experience that sensation of stillness in the moment with leaves falling like that. Yet I never wanted what I put on the page to serve as any kind of literal reminder, and in fictionalizing something actual I wanted to imbue the piece with something mysterious. Images were a way for me to imagine a link to the past from the present and to slow down, to listen, and see how that listening would drive the story forward. As this developed, I also began to see that there was a link between place and the characters (individually and collectively), and that specific images might take on a life of their own and become a kind of refrain.
There are religious references throughout this piece. Characters seek salvation, are abandoned by God. How does religion color your characters’ views of the world? Do their views bring more comfort or distress to their lives?
To my mind, colonial New England is one of the freakiest places or periods you can imagine. Perhaps this has something to do with my upbringing in suburban California; even prep school in A Separate Peace (which we all had to read in high school) seemed exotic, let alone the full-on amplified crazy of the Salem witch trials. So it’s safe to say that I’m a little obsessed, historically speaking. I’m interested in that transmutation from collective religious hysteria to the formation of community; turning points and differences, and how they work to fray, expand, and contract the social fiber; order and disorder; how we grapple with change. The characters here are grasping at—or flaunting—ideas of salvation to make sense of an epidemic, and some of them find a reconnection to the land or themselves or others, but it doesn’t always work.
What thinking went into the organization of this story?
So here’s the thing: I’ve always considered myself more or less a straightforward realist writer, but I have my forays into nonconventional narrative too. I’m just less sure of them, so I need to find an organizing principle somehow. Here that was easy; the grave marker numbers correspond to victims of the epidemic, so I used these as anchors, though they aren’t necessarily sequential. And this also allowed me to use bits of real fact (e.g., a known identity of a smallpox victim) without overworrying it—this is distinctly a fiction and not a creative nonfiction, in other words, and I want that license to imagine. I also love an opportunity to shift around in time if I can get away with it. Some kind of narrative arc had to build, however, so I used the markers not linked to specific characters grow the larger world of the story beyond the pest house itself. When that extension began to happen I started to realize that the images + marker orientation + community became its own kind of song, so to speak.
Who is inspiring you right now? Are there any authors you can recommend to us?
In terms of inspiration for the novel I’m working on, Michael Ondaatje’s work has been revelatory for me over the past year: his movement and associations in the language, the way time and history slip around, structurally, which for me makes the telling all the more felt. Patrick Modiano is a more recent discovery for me, I’m almost embarrassed to admit; as a long-time fan of W. G. Sebald, how could I have not read him before? Then there are the re-reads, some of which I’m teaching this fall to graduate fiction students: Sherwood Anderson’s fabulously weird Winesburg, Ohio (seriously, it gets weirder and better every time I read it) and John Edgar Wideman’s collection Fever (the title story being hands-down one of my favorite things ever written, for me a model of what so-called historical fiction might achieve if it dares and how language from the past and present can intertwine to symphonic effect). I’ve been pretty obsessed with Hassan Blasim’s collection The Corpse Exhibition, which I taught in a course about contemporary Middle Eastern fiction this past year and have returned to again for stories that are so daring in voice and perspective that they makes me re-think just what “daring” actually is. And for a completely tonal change of pace—and also because I’ve just moved to the Deep South—I’ve been rediscovering Ellen Gilchrist’s stories; that acerbic wit and utter immersion combined with an almost devil-may-care approach to story structure is marvelous.
I’ve also been reading a fair amount of poetry, and can heartily recommend Todd Hearon’s No Other Gods (check out the “memorandum” poems) and Maggie Dietz’s second collection, That Kind of Happy (her title poem is deceptively straightforward but will ring in your ears for a good long while). I’m also loving Jamaal May’s Hum: talk about a way to investigate place, in this case often the urban landscape of Detroit, and Let’s Let That Are Not Yet: Inferno by Ed Pavlić: you can’t easily label this poetry or prose or criticism or autobiography, and it’s wonderful.
What are you working on currently?
My large project is a novel called The Dailies, which is set partly in Berlin’s WWII film industry and follows two German half-sisters and other characters during the war and after. This has been ongoing for several years now, evolving in terms of just about every angle of craft and plot you could imagine, and I’m aiming to nail down the final version this year. There’s a new novel idea I’ve started tinkering with too—this one will return to the Middle East, where the stories in my first collection were set, and focusing on characters whose lives are affected by the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policies during the Gulf Wars. I have various story drafts in the works as well. Most of these are longer short stories, which is the form I tend to gravitate toward, but I’m becoming keen on seeing how I might work with shorter short forms as well; revisiting this particular piece here has been inspiring in this way! I have loads of fragments in my notebooks that don’t connect to my longer pieces, but rarely am I able to bring them to fruition the way I did with “House in the Woods.” I’d like to see what I can do.