A few weeks ago, at Barnes & Noble on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, Robin MacArthur and Anna Noyes, authors of the 2016 Discover New Writers selections Half Wild and Goodnight, Beautiful Women, sat down with award-winning memoirist and Oprah.com books editor Leigh Newman to talk about the art of the short story, and how their two brilliant collections take the New England territory well known by these writers and expose a side of it only seen by those who are there past Labor Day. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.– Miwa Messer
Leigh Newman: I have a love affair with the short story that is almost embarrassing. I feel that perhaps it separated me from my children and my husband several times. Other people get in trouble for being an Instagram husband. My husband is probably a short story husband.. It was so exciting to read these two books together. Of course, they are absolutely different; every artist creates a different kind of collection. But these two writers have so many points of complicity, even if they are creating very different, distinctive voices and very different and distinctive takes on the life of a female, life in rural America, class, gender, love, heartbreak, disappointment, loss, confusion, and maybe some slight glimmer of grace.
Half Wild is Robin MacArthur’s brilliant, wonderful book about rural Vermont. A lot of the stories—although they come in different perspectives, from men, from women, from old women, from young girls, different time periods—do reflect on the female experience in sort of a…I wouldn’t call it a hardscrabble Vermont, but I would call it not the Vermont of the beautiful NPR commercial with the Volvo station wagon careening through a green grass with cows. It’s a Vermont, the people that live in it, in all of its complicated socioeconomic levels, and all of its utopian dreams maybe not quite as realized as the dreamers wanted them to be.
Anna Noyes’ collection, Goodnight, Beautiful Women, all takes place in Maine. It similarly shows a side of Maine and reveals it in a beautiful way—a Maine landscape that could be harsh and confusing and… I hate to go back to the word “beautiful.” Once you put “beautiful” in the title and then you read her prose, you realize it actually belongs there. But it’s a land that isn’t the Maine where you go and you crack lobsters, and you eat them, and you have your corn, and you stay in your beautiful white-shuttered house on your windswept coast. It’s a Maine where there’s poverty and there’s drug use, and there’s love, and there’s very-very complicated women who live in all of these stories.
I thought we’d talk first, actually, about writing against geographic stereotype. Because both of you come from New England. I’m from Alaska, so I’m the last person who would know about New England. I don’t know anything about New England! I’ve been learning, because I’ve been living in New York for 15 years. But this is not the New England you read about. I wanted you to talk about why you felt so compelled to write this way, and how it was received, and what you were thinking about, writing against geographical stereotype.
Robin MacArthur: I thought a lot about that. I grew up in a small town in Vermont, where my dad also grew up, so I kind of had this perspective of 67 years of class and economic disparity in Vermont, and knew… I went to public schools. I knew these kind of backwater, backwoods lives that were not represented at all in our cultural utopian vision of what Vermont is. Vermont and Maine both are such tourism destinations and second-home destinations… I went to Brown after public high school, where everybody I met said, “Oh, I love Vermont; I have a second home there” or “I have a ski house there” or “I love Ben and Jerry’s.” I just felt this gut-wrenching need to say, “Actually, that’s not at all the Vermont that I know, and it’s a much more complex picture.” Even people who live there, I think it’s easy to see the surface beauty and not see the poverty and the hardship, and just disparity of…the nuance of place that, if you’ve been there for one of more generations, you get access to.
Anna Noyes: Yeah, I totally relate to that. The funny thing for me is I actually didn’t intend to write a book about Maine, even though this is clearly a book that is very geographically rooted. But my thoughts on what a book about Maine was, was based on narratives I’d seen and I’d read that felt overly romanticized, and I had this dread of having a book marketed or sort of brought out into the world with, like, a woman on a lobster boat, like, zooming into the sunset on the cover…
LN: Just her back would be to you.
AN: Yes, exactly. Gazing out at the waves and stuff. I didn’t want to identify my book as that kind of a book. So it took me sort of a process of coming to terms with the fact that, in fact, it really was a book rooted in Maine.
I didn’t intentionally go about writing stories that illuminated the place in a particular way. I was just drawing on the weft of my real life. People keep talking about what a class book it is, and the disparity between classes. My grandparents were summer people. They winterized their home. My parents were the first ones to live there year-round. Then I was there year-round, and grew up with my friends, and lived a very different sort of life. So I think I sort of had a foot in both those camps. The sort of telling exemplary details of place and class and unromanticized Maine are just born from me trying to be true to what I’ve seen there.
LN: Was there some nervousness, just because… Whether or not, when you’re writing about a place, in some way you’re representing your place. Right? Whether you want to or not. Was there some hesitation about portraying this place in this way? I mean, veering off the postcard? Or were you like, “I’m doing it,” and everybody was behind you.
AN: I wanted to be sensitive to was summer people. I don’t want to isolate them. Not just as readers, but they are very near and dear to me, and I know a lot of summer people. In my community, in the winter it’s 250 people and in the summer it’s 1,000. So through all my life, I’ve had a pretty complex relationship with them, where they’re my family, some of them, but then they sort of didn’t quite let me in, and I got very bitter, and now I’m like with them again in an intimate way. I know that is an experience of Maine that is very dear to people, and to readers, editors, people that read this book, like, they resonate with it—and they summer there, too. I didn’t want to diminish the intensity or poignancy of that connection to the state either, because I think for them it’s very true. I just don’t think it’s the whole picture.
RM: I’d say that I felt kind of feisty about it. Like, “Here! Here’s my Vermont. Here’s my real Vermont.” That “real” in quotation marks, because everybody has their sense of place.
I also try to write from a variety of perspectives, including the daughter of a woman who moved to Vermont in the 1960s as a hippie and started a commune. So these are not all third and fourth generation Vermonters. I tried to create as many perspectives as I could.
LN: That was a conscious choice?
RM: That was a conscious choice, to come at it from as many different angles… I love short stories also. My kids, I think they feel the threat of short stories in their lives, like, “Oh, no! My Mom is reading them again and writing them again.”
LN: Many of the stories seem to talk to each other. That’s one thing I noticed in both collections. Whether it was intentional or not, people talk about a linked story collection, and I think nobody knows what that means. Honestly, nobody does. It could mean anything from everyone might use the word “broccoli” in every story (and I have seen that collection), or it could mean that the same characters appear in different stories. In these stories, you wouldn’t necessarily call them a linked collection, but they are definitely talking to each other. They are definitely in conversation with each other. Why would you choose that instead of the easier route of writing a novel in terms of success and glamor?
AN: I will say that I’m writing a novel, and it’s not easier. It’s so much harder!
I love collections that are set in place, and they have this inherent structure built in that you can just write on. If you are doing stories set in one places, it’s facets, it’s different angles, different perspectives, and the place can be a main character. So I never had to question what the collection was about. I had to figure out the heart of every story individually. But the book had an inherent built-in structure that I never had to second guess like I have to wonder about my novel on a daily basis.
LN: I felt, too, that your collection had a very painterly touch, where you felt you were lighting on one life and then lighting on another life. It was very impressionistic, the way these things were running. Your stories felt more individuated.
AN: Yeah, I think their linked elements are more due to the fact that I’m just obsessed with the same things, and I cannot run from them, and I just tell the same sort of emotional story again and again in different masks and in different ways. But I think I’m naturally definitely a short story writer. I think at the heart of each story, I’m trying to touch on something that I don’t want to unveil really in my own life, something uniquely vulnerable or some sort of secret or secret tale that I don’t particularly want to tell. So I think each of them has its own singular shame of that sort, that I don’t think you combine them all into one huge, shameful novel, because it might defuse the emotional risk and potency and of it. And also, I write really, really quickly. I wrote these all over the course of maybe two days, or one overnight. So I could really, like, confess what I needed to confess in one, like, dictatorial moment without having all the self-doubt and fear come out that happens when you try to write a novel, which I am trying to do now, too. But it’s a lot harder to keep the faith, like, day-in and day-out, to risk things in that way.
LN: For me, that’s amazing that you wrote them in one to two days.
AN: Well, I gestated them for like ten years, you know, then I…
RM: It took me about 8 years to write these, but I was also writing a lot of them at 4 a.m. because I had a young baby or that was the only hour that my kids were not awake. I wrote some of them while nursing my kids and trying to type. But I’m wildly impressed.
AN: I think that’s the best time, though. 4 a.m.. Now I’m a seasoned 28-year-old, and I can’t stay up past midnight without getting weird.
LN: I think this leads us to another point that I was thinking about. There were a lot of interesting perspectives on female life in rural America. I want to mention one story where a young woman in Anna’s collection gets pregnant, and is deciding whether not to have the baby or have the baby with the mother of her boyfriend, without the boyfriend knowing. It’s kind of one of those flinching hard moments that are so confusing but so true to how things, as a woman, kind of unroll.
It did feel like you guys were grabbing hold of experiences in a woman’s life, in all kinds of different ways, even if it came from a different perspective, even if it came, you know, from a grandmother or a boyfriend. Could you talk a little bit about that?
AN: There was a nice, sort of defining moment that I’ve talked about a few times, where I’ve been writing these stories for a while, but in college I had a class where they assigned a story, where they had us read a story called Bactine by Molly McNett, and it was about a 10-year-old girl’s sort of emerging sexuality, and grappling with all these adult ideas and a threatening sexual world through her 10-year-old’s body. She has these sort of strange fantasies. It seemed to me like a very true representation of how a child might deal with an external threat that she doesn’t quite understand, and how it is sort of manifested in a girl’s body. I hadn’t really read anything quite like that before, and it felt really fresh and exciting. I got to class, and the class was completely silent. I remember there was just this deluge of disgust and dismay, and everybody was like, “This was so gross, I couldn’t even talk about it, I couldn’t read it, I had to put it down.” It was an illuminating moment of how often we read stories of women’s bodies and girls’ bodies, which I think is not that often… We see a lot of narratives of sort of disembodied women and girls, or violence upon women and girls, or sexualization. But to have a narrative from that perspective seems to me a lot more rare and a lot more troubling for readers. And I’ve seen that echoed again and again, these narratives that have an inhabited experience of womanhood, people really recoil from or think are remarkably edgy or something… So then I sort of thought: Why don’t I try to tell stories that have an inhabited female experience? So that led to the rest of the collection in the back of my mind.
RM: I would say that similarly it was a hunger for the kind of stories that I was craving and I wasn’t seeing. I read so much rural fiction written by men, about men’s experiences in the natural world and their relation to the natural world. That’s a huge genre of men go out into the woods and have these encounters and these experiences. And I do… My mother knows how to wield a shotgun, and she rides a motorcycle, and she’s a farmer—she works 14 hours a day out in her berry fields and vegetable gardens. I grew up surrounded by these reallytough, original, intrepid kind of wonderfully solitary women in the woods, and I never saw them portrayed in fiction. So it was this hunger. I went looking for it. I think if I had found your stories, I would have been so gratified, when I was 28 especially, and just looking to find myself on the page and my mother on the page. So then I decided that I just had to write those women into my own fiction. That experience is inherently…includes sexuality and desire and our physical bodies. So that just naturally came in.
LN: Yeah. I saw that these are women who do have sex, and they do think about men, in the most natural, in the most understandable in motive of ways as a reader. I also felt exactly what you were talking about, most especially in the last story, which is called “The Women Where I’m From” and your story “Goodnight, Beautiful Women.” You see these women who are very flawed. Many of them are very flawed. They have drinking problems. They are living alone on a property. They are not the best mothers. They go through some men. Occasionally they fall on an opiate or take it, or take a lot of them—or maybe it’s not even occasional. But somehow, all of these women come off as heroines to me in some way, or alter-egos, and I felt very full as a woman reading these stories. I felt very excited to be a woman. Can we talk about that a little bit more? You mentioned it a little bit, but I think it’s a super-important point to see… We often read stories where men are flawed, like they abandon their kids, they lose their job, they move to Florida, they’re trying to pull it together but they’re still comically or flawedly heroic. But we don’t really see the women who bust it up, get fired, end up alone because they’ve wrecked it all, you know what I mean, but are still wonderful human beings and we love them. I wonder if we could talk about that a little bit.
AN: I am moved to hear you say that. Because there is a certain response to the book of people who really don’t want to see themselves in the book at all, or say “It’s so dark, I can’t relate to any of these people.” Then about one in five women, like a 70-year-old woman, will be like, “It is dark, but you just might see yourself. I did.” Yes! It’s like I found you. I’m so happy to make that connection with you.
To me, it was important that there be an element of tenderness in these stories, even with characters that are…some might see them as being bad mothers, or bad partners or daughters… That may be true. But my hope was at the end there’s some sort of redemption, and throughout that there is great strength and some humor.
I think that’s true of the people of Maine in particular, and of Vermont, too, I think. You’re showing an underbelly, I guess, but it’s not like it’s void of these beautiful qualities and really remarkable presences, and I hope that comes through. In your stories, it definitely does.
RM: I would say alongside the genre of men who go out into the wilderness is rural women who are victimized, or who are victims of their circumstances. Which is a very real thing, and that’s a wonderful thing to write about. But I didn’t want to write about women who are victims. I wanted to write about women who are choosing their flawed lives, are choosing to live alone, are choosing solitude, are choosing those edges, and they crave it—just like I crave it. Somebody was saying… I feel like my mother is half of the mothers in these books, and I am the other half. I am the mother who is always heading out to the garden with the wine and trying to disappear into the woods. As a mother and a daughter, I seek that wildness. I seek that escape and that edge, and I wanted to write about that hunger and that desire, because I’m sure a lot of people feel it. I hope.
LN: In both of your cases there’s stories about mothers and sisters. Yours take place in a quarry, not the first story, but the second story with the two sisters in the quarry, and then Creek Dippers with the mother. I know this sounds crazy, and not even really specific, but I think there’s some relationship with water, or why you’re saying these stories about women and water, and what it somehow means. It means some kind of freedom in both cases. There’s people that want to swim and there’s people that don’t want to swim.
AN: The genesis of that for me was that I lived beside a rock quarry when I was 4 years old with my mom in an Airstream trailer for like two months, and I was absolutely forbidden to go anywhere near the edge, because, of course, quarries are very, very dangerous places and they really do have all kinds of old machinery, and old cars, and hypodermic needles on the cliffs, and all this threat is really real. Even when I was older, my mom would never let me swim there, and would say I would catch a yeast infection if I even dared to swim there. And I still haven’t swam in one.
So I think it built this very mythological depth and resonance in my mind of this place, because it was this sort of forbidden locale. Of course, it’s very rich like other forbidden things, and mothers trying to protect their daughters from certain things. So it seemed like a very evocative place to set stories.
LN: We always had lakes. I felt the same way about your creeks, that somehow this is what people did. You had a couple of glasses of wine and you went swimming in the creek.
RM: My parents’ house is set right above a creek, and I spent a lot of time by the creek when I was young, and now my house is on the other side of that creek, so I have this creek reference. But I also read an academic essay at one point about water in Eudora Welty’s stories, and the symbolism of water and how it connects to female sexuality. I never thought of that…
AN: Nobody thinks of that when you’re writing.
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Sig Nordal 