It’s not as if Carol Anshaw is my idol.  It’s not as if she’s my crush. It’s not even as if I’ve longed for years to meet her. She is, however one of several writers to whose work I connected instantly, whose novels I have read repeatedly, and whose turns of phrase have seemed to me particularly profound. Of course by particularly profound I mean reflective of my specific worldview. Isn’t that what reading is essentially about?

In theory a reader reads to stroll outside of her specific mental neighborhood, to allow the scenery there to change her. However, most often the lines that strike us, the paragraphs we underline, the passages that alter our lives, all resonate not because they are stunning in their novelty, but because they are somehow deeply familiar. And that familiarity can have unintended emotional consequences; it can cause a reader to feel unjustifiably connected to a writer.

Think for a moment about a one-night stand. I could meet a woman in a bar, take her home with me, and fuck her till morning. She might awake feeling connected to me on an intimate level completely unwarranted by the casual sexual encounter  we shared. She might act possessive and insist upon making me eggs. Just as the language of interlocking bodies can be easily mistranslated, easily endowed with meaning more profound than it deserves; there’s something similarly powerful and misleading about the rush of familiarity and resulting unbalanced connection inherent in reading. 

This is not to say that after absorbing Ms. Anshaw’s work I have determined that every time she uses the word “and” she is secretly asking for my hand in marriage. Rather, I am attempting to frankly admit to the internal discomfort that arises when a reader is given the opportunity to interview a writer to whom she feels sincerely connected but with whom that connection is entirely one-sided.

What follows is an exact transcription of both our external dialogue and my internal monologue. Although by this point I feel I know you well enough to trust you to differentiate between the two (after all, we’ve been together for two full paragraphs now—that’s like two years in Lesbian Time), I have helpfully italicized the rantings of my inner voice. Before we begin however, some brief background on Carol herself. She is after all the subject of this interview.

Born in Detroit and received her degree from Vermont College--author of the novels Aquamarine, Seven Moves, and my personal favorite, Lucky in the Corner--stories, "Hammam" and "Elvis Has Left the Building" included in Best American Short Stories of 1994 and 1998-- a past fellow of the Illinois Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts--teaches in the MFA in Writing program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago--has won the Carl Sandburg and Society of Midland Authors awards for fiction—three times been a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award.

Let’s turn our attention now to a Starbucks in Andersonville (a neighborhood in Chicago, Illinois), where Carol Anshaw and I sit together at a table by the window discussing, well, her while I think about, well, me.

So, these questions are all over the map; I’m obviously interested in your work itself, but I’m also interested in how you work.

CA - Oh, I see.

Why don’t we start with some process-oriented questions.

CA - Like do I use a pen or a quill. I do use a quill actually.

Crap, she’s funny. Well, of course, her books are funny. Does that mean I have to be funny?

You don’t really use a quill.

CA - I do, I use a quill. And then I put a wax stamp on everything I finish with my initial on it.

Okay, now that was really funny. Volley back. Say something about, I don’t know, Carrier Pigeons.  

CA - and I only use velum, whatever the hell that is.

Or is that the wrong era? Maybe I should go esoteric—drop a reference to those kings who shaved their messengers’ heads and tattooed a message on their scalps and then waited for their hair to grow back and then sent them to a different kingdom and the other king shaved their heads and read the message and…did that even happen or was that a dream I once had after eating some bad shrimp?

CA -Then I bind my books in goatskin. So my office really smells.

Okay, no time for that—just go for the Carrier Pigeons.

So, you rent an office here?

I choked damn it!

CA -Yeah, I’ve always had an office. 

You just write here?

CA -I just write here.

So what made you decide you wanted an office separate from -

CA - What made me decide was years ago I tried to write at home. I would wear my pajamas way too far into the day, get depressed in the winter…If I have an office to go to it’s like I have a little job? And my job is writing. The point is having a space where I only write. That space can be an office it can be a table at this coffee shop. Once I used a spare bedroom in a friend’s apartment. Sometimes it can just be a psychic space: you’re at your writing table and certain hours of the day you don’t pick up the phone, you don’t go online which has become a great sucking hole for writers, and you just write. I think you can build up habits. I’ve been writing a long time and I can tell you that almost everybody who was writing when I started out writing doesn’t write anymore. It’s very easy to stop. Other things intervene, people have a couple of kids or they get a real high-pressure job or they make a lot of money and they don’t write fiction anymore. So you have to write when you’re not inspired; it just becomes part of what you do. If I’m not writing I’m real irritable because it’s a very ingrained habit; it’s like coffee. If I don’t have my coffee in the morning I’m not that happy. If I don’t write I’m not that happy. But I think it’s not for everybody. People want to be writers but not all of them really want to write.

So, in terms of writing what does an average day look like for you?

Things are on track. I was worried there for a bit, got a little carried away with the Carrier Pigeons. Get it, carried, Carrier Pigeons? Christ, get off the pigeons already.

CA -There is none. I wish there were. If I have a writing day I think it takes me eight hours up there to maybe work three, you know? There’s all the, you know, making a cup of tea and getting my mail.

And you teach, and I read you reviewed books?

CA - I used to. I did for a really long time.

So, do you have issues balancing?

I’m starting every sentence with “So.” Why am I doing that?

CA - Sure, doesn’t everybody? I mean, Phillip Roth doesn’t. He works by himself, outside New York and he writes in a little house that’s behind his house and that’s all he does, he doesn’t have to teach or anything like that, so I don’t think he has balance issues. Alice Munroe lives up in Canada, in, not a reclusive way exactly, but she says that she writes every day for four hours or something. I’m always admiring of people who…they’ve really carved out that space, but for me, like everybody else, I have a lot of other things I have to be doing to be a human in the world and so…

Let’s move on to some questions about your work.

That was abrupt. Probably gave the woman whiplash.

In Lucky in the Corner - I recommended the book to a lot of people-

CA -That’s good.

Approval!

Yeah. A couple of women from Chicago read it and were thrown by how specifically you placed events. Like, this happened on the corner of Clark and Berwyn.

CA - Oh, they didn’t like it?

There goes the approval.

They got mired down trying to figure out exactly where events were occurring.

CA - If they didn’t live in Chicago they wouldn’t feel that way cause it would just be a set and a backdrop for them, you know what I mean?

So that detail was an intentional choice?

No, she wrote it by accident.

CA - Sure, I like to make a complete scene. How many people didn’t like it though? Like, 50?

Backpedal.

No, well, two women said the same thing, but they’re in a relationship, so maybe they just think the same way, like they’ve done the lesbian merge or something.

Threw in some lesbian lingo there to establish my street cred. Wurd.

CA - (Laughs)

Score!

CA - You know when you’re a writer you hardly ever hear that stuff. I went to a library luncheon and this old librarian came up to me, she said, “You know, I think your book is immoral.” Well, thanks for telling me that because most people wouldn’t say that.

How did you respond?

CA - Well, I can see where she might think that. Did you read Aquamarine? In the first part she thought that Jessie having an affair with that UPS guy while she was pregnant was immoral.

So, let me ask you a question about that book actually.

Now that’s a transition.

Aquamarine came out in 1992. Do you still remember what the initial kernel of inspiration was?

CA - Yes I do. Two things. One, sometimes I’ll be out and I’ll see somebody my age and they’re very different and I think wow, you know, they could be me if I had made different choices. So that’s one impulse. The other impulse was to write about somebody who had their big moment early on and then everything was kind of a long soft downhill slide from there. I merged those. I had to have somebody who had something important happen to them at around 17, 18. You know a lot of the choices we make that we’re stuck with the rest of our lives are made when we’re really least capable of making good decisions. So she had to be a piano prodigy or a sports star of some kind, and I’d been a swimmer so I used swimming. I love that book. I loved writing it. It was pure pleasure to write, it was so much fun. I always like when people like it, it’s an old friend.

And then Seven Moves, which came out around 1996, was essentially about a woman whose partner disappears and she then realizes that the partner was, if not leading a double life, at least keeping a lot of important information from the protagonist.  I know that as a reader one is not meant to focus on whether or not the author is writing from experience, but that book was so vivid and so sort of fraught with complex emotions...

“Fraught with complex emotions?”

...that I wondered if, within the fictional framework of the novel...

Did you have a girlfriend who fucked you over and then vanished?

...some minor aspects might have been drawn from life?

CA - Well, I have a teacher, someone I show everything to, she said I should write more into emotions, not glide over the surface, that I was extremely facile but didn’t really get down to painful stuff, so I had known of a situation like this that had happened when I was in my twenties. I worked with a woman and she disappeared and the husband was clueless, hired a detective.

Damn.

CA - You know, she left a pot of soup on the stove, she was making a quilt and she was mid-stitch…ultimately she turned up in the lake. It was during that time before he found out -- it was months -- you would have a ton of emotions but wouldn’t know which you had a right to. You might be angry, but you can’t be angry because what if she got bopped on the head by somebody, you know? It would just be an enormously traumatic time; it would be interesting to write about it.

How did you know when you’d mined the emotions enough?

CA - Well, it kind of had a time trajectory. And I like leaving a few--and I do this in all three books-- leave a few footfalls out beyond the edge of the book.

Are there any specific themes that you’ve noticed in your work over time and do they change? Are there particular things that tend to inspire you?

CA - I like to think about how people go off the rails because of some out-of-left-field attraction, so that’s kind of a recurring theme. I’m also interested in sibling relationships. I have a lot of brothers in my work and I loved my brother very, very much and even in this new book he will be there.

Yes, you have a new book.

CA - I am just finishing my novel, Afternoon on the Milky Way. I think I've been working on it about 4 years.

So, keeping track of what happens on the inside of the book…

You mean plot! Say plot!

Rather, when it comes to plot, do you map things out in advance or just write?

CA - Yeah. With this one I did. But I don’t know everything that’s going to happen in the middle and I still don’t know all of everything that’s going to happen at the end.

Can one write without mapping?

CA - I don’t think it’s possible to write a really big book…they say Beethoven wrote all these symphonies in his head and he couldn’t hear them, anything’s possible I suppose, but for me I would get lost. I have to know what age somebody is and where their house is in relation-- although according to your friends in the lesbian merge they don’t wanna know where anything is, they want that French anti-novel that takes place in a total void or whatever.

So, speaking of lesbians…

Fuck it. Clearly I have no ability to transition whatsoever. Good thing I was born a woman. Har har. Just some queer humor there.

Is being categorized as a Lesbian or Queer Author negative or positive?

CA - Aw, it’s both. I mean, I really really value my queer readers and I like to think I’m doing something for that body of literature.

You totally are.

Kissup.

CA - I feel like that’s a part of what I’m trying to do. From another direction, I’ll be happy when the world of literature is big enough to accommodate novels with straight and gay characters the way it does American and Chinese characters and you know, you don’t have to say “Lesbian Writer” like I’m having sex while I’ve got one hand on the lap top, you know? You wouldn’t say “Straight Writer.” You know, “Lorrie Moore, Heterosexual Writer.” I guess that’s what I would say about all that. Did you buy this little thing just for this interview?

The tape recorder?

CA - (Nods.)

Yeah…?

No I -

CA - You had it?

Yeah.

Think fast. No, think fast. The other fast!

It’s good for bootlegging Indigo Girls concerts.

I bought it to impress Jodi Foster.

CA - Oh, great. Yeah you know, I write with a quill and then I have a big reel-to-reel tape deck I have to bring if I want to record a concert. It’s really hard to get in under my coat.

Again with the funny! I’ve got nothing. When all else fails:

So…

And there it is.

I want to get back to questions involving process.

Right now, not earlier when it would have been logical to do so.

Are there specific things like exercises or emergency plans you use when you’re stuck writing?

CA - No, I never have any trouble because see, if I have a day where I’m not feeling like going further I can always go back. I’m an incessant polisher and adder to and taker away from and all that so I can do that for days and it still feels like some progress to me.

God, she’s this real writer. What the hell am I?

Do you ever get scared when you haven’t written for a while, like you think, what if I never write again, or do you have a confidence that -

CA - No, because I’m always writing -

I’m going to stop here in a minute, because Carol is about to grant me a perfectly worded conclusion; a sentence that wraps up our interview, and perhaps even epitomizes the life of a writer. In life, people say ideal last things all the time, but scenes bleed into scenes, and words echo less profoundly than in fiction. In this case, we spoke for another half hour, and I remained more carefully attuned to my inner monologue than to the insights of the woman on whose words I profess to hang. There was no final phrase, no ideal summation of all that we had discussed. After a while I got up to throw my cup away, and a homeless man approached Carol to beg for change. We’ll leave all that aside though; we’ll let Carol have the last word. And if you relate to that choice, if it resonates, makes you feel like I’ve read the words emblazoned on your soul as easily as picking out sentences on the back of a cereal box, I can accept that, it’s the nature of the beast. Just please don’t try to make me eggs in the morning.

 
After living in Los Angeles for the last four years, Sarah T Rosenblum left to pursue an MFA in Creative Writing at the Art Institute of Chicago. She is now very cold and also she misses Lindsay Lohan. Incidentally, Sarah actually does believe that every time Carol Anshaw says the word “and” she is secretly asking for her hand in marriage. Shh. Don’t tell Carol.