In 2014, when I was studying in Bowling Green State University’s MFA program, I helped coordinate Winter Wheat: The Mid-American Review Festival of Writing. Our keynote speaker that year was Anne Valente, an alum from the MFA program and the recent winner of the Dzanc Books Short Fiction Prize for her first collection, By Light We Knew Our Names. I sat mesmerized as Anne read the title story from the collection at that reading, proud that I was attending the same program as a writer of her caliber. I think everyone in the audience knew at the time that this book of stories was only the beginning of a bigger and bolder career.
Since then, Anne has gone on to publish two novels: Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down, which surrounds a school shooting followed by a mysterious string of arsons, and her latest, The Desert Sky Before Us, a road trip novel about two sisters sent on a mission by their deceased paleontologist mother. Her work is atmospheric, high concept, and brimming with creative research. While I don’t know Anne personally, I’ve followed her career with interest over the years, and I admire her stellar essays (like “Killer Whales” and “No Boys Allowed“) as well as her fiction.
After seeing Anne read at the Brews and Prose series in Cleveland in June, I decided to ask her some questions about her writing career. Our conversation covered MFA programs, first (and failed) novels, the research process, novel structure, self-promotion quandaries, playing the long game, and more:
We both attended the same MFA program, though at different times. In this podcast, you discussed not writing extensively prior to the MFA. Can you tell us a bit about how you got started, what drove you to start writing seriously, and why you decided to enter an MFA? What aspects of the program were most useful in terms of your development as a writer? And in what ways might the program have subverted your expectations?
Anne Valente: Attending the MFA program at Bowling Green was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made in my life. I hope you enjoyed it just as much! I wasn’t an undergraduate creative writing major and felt very intimidated by the world of fiction before attending the MFA. But I realized while working full-time after college that it was something I desperately wanted to try doing, so I took a night class and from there wrote two stories that could serve as my application writing sample. I pursued an MFA because I wanted to spend two devoted years to learning how to write fiction, to just give myself that time to see if it was something I could do. Bowling Green was the absolute perfect place for that. It was the most welcoming and eye-opening program for me, both in terms of the professors’ approach to pedagogy and in what I learned from the expansive, diverse work of my peers. The program was also a crash course in publishing, and I learned so much about the landscape of literary journals by working for Mid-American Review and by perusing their literary journal library every single week. I didn’t expect to grow so much there, or to take away a lifelong community—not only of my peers, who are some of my very best friends in the entire world, but of other writers from other years (like you!) who are so invested in reading and supporting each other’s work. For me, it’s been the most warm and supportive community I could ever hope for in the writing world, and I feel lucky to be a part of it.
You won the Dzanc Books Short Story Prize for your first collection in the years after the MFA and, from there, you signed with an agent and went on to publish two novels: Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down and The Desert Sky Before Us. When you look back on the arc of your career to this point, what were some of the defining moments for you, either big or small? What particular choices or actions do you think most affected your career trajectory?
Valente: Winning the Dzanc Prize felt huge, particularly because in the weeks before receiving the phone call I was considering giving up writing entirely. It had been two years since the MFA and I’d been revising and sending out the collection those entire two years, all to resounding rejections. I was also working a very difficult job and wondered if a new path might be a healthier option for me. But within two weeks of each other, I was accepted to a doctoral program in creative writing after being rejected for three years straight, and then received the news that the collection had won the prize. I’ve since tried to be more patient with setbacks and delayed gratification, particularly in the dovetailing of publishing and academic teaching and how they are definitely intertwined, but how sometimes one might be going better than the other. For me, remembering to play the long game has been helpful in persevering, particularly in a field that can come with so many ups and downs.
My research indicates that, like many of us, you have a “drawer novel,” which means Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down was your first published novel but not the first novel you wrote. Can you tell us about this first novel that you’ve since tucked away? What are some of the most important lessons you learned from writing that manuscript that informed your next two novels?
Valente: I do have a drawer novel! I was working on it at Bowling Green and was so smug at the time that it wouldn’t be a drawer novel, that I wouldn’t “waste” my time on writing something that would never be published. It was a pretty saccharine coming-of-age novel, and in retrospect, I’m very glad it remained in the drawer. And the time definitely wasn’t wasted—I realize now that I was learning how to structure and sustain a longer narrative after writing short stories. I still feel like structure is something I’m relearning again and again with each new novel. In addition, as a sentence-level writer, lyricism is difficult to sustain across 400 pages instead of across 20 of a short story; you risk reader burnout with too much syntax play. I’m still learning this too in each new manuscript, which I first cut my teeth on with that drawer novel.
I occasionally encounter aspiring novelists who seem horrified at the prospect of their first novel turning into a “drawer novel.” I understand their angst—I do!—but making the choice to abandon a first novel is a fairly common phenomenon among novelists. What would you tell these writers who can’t bear the thought of putting aside their first books to turn to new work?
Valente: It’s definitely an unbearable thought, and I think that’s why I was so overconfident—I wouldn’t be one of those writers! But given how common the drawer novel is, as you mention, I think this speaks to how long it takes for many of us to figure out our voices, and how we want to structure and set down those voices on the page. That time is never wasted, even if it feels unimaginable to put aside so many pages you worked on, sometimes for many months and years. For me, it was like a training program for a marathon—it would have been impossible to run the marathon without many months of the right kind of training. I had to learn the rhythm of my own sentences and the patterns of my ideas and structural tics in order to write a “first” novel that felt more authentically like my own.
Both Our Hearts Will Burn Us Down and The Desert Sky Before Us feature structures that include interstitial sections—bits of imaginative research, newspaper articles, case histories, and more inserted in the main narrative. How did you go about managing those structural decisions, and did your methods evolve by the time you began working on the second novel?
Valente: In Our Hearts, the structural decision rested on the subject matter—I didn’t want to be the singular, authorial voice for the aftermath of a mass shooting, a tragedy that affects an entire community but also the individual in so many different ways. This is where the first-person plural perspective came from, as well as the research, articles, diagrams and yearbook entries. I wanted the novel to be as polyvocal as possible. For Desert Sky, I ended up including library catalogs and book excerpts since both sisters work in education and libraries, but also because I wanted the structured, defined information to serve as a counterpoint to the uncontrolled, experiential knowledge each sister learns on the road. Ultimately, I’m trying to figure out a new kind of structure for a third novel-in-progress that I’m currently working on. I don’t want interstitial sections to be a tic of mine, and yet they also serve the purpose of allowing language to do something new in shorter sections; they are a shortcut to including smaller bursts of lyricism or a different authorial voice. I’m still trying to figure out how structure can best serve a novel’s use of language while also forwarding its momentum and plot.
You clearly do a good amount of research for your fiction—paleontology, falconry, NASCAR racing, and geocaching play major roles in The Desert Sky Before Us, for example. How do you approach the research process for fiction? Do you dedicate yourself to research before you start writing, or do you find you often have to return for deeper research as you’re drafting or revising? What tips do you have for other novelists as they set about researching their projects?
Valente: Research has always been a cornerstone of my writing, I think because I find fiction to be a phenomenal excuse to look out at the world. There’s so much to learn and explore! Generally, my research comes from things I’m exposed to in the world that I’d like to learn more about—a documentary on NASCAR, for instance, when I’d never before thought to know anything about the world of racing. Often these pockets of exposure—on television, at museums, on the radio, walking around my neighborhood and noticing a particular bird call—become narrative threads if I follow their rabbit holes. I do conduct a fair bit of research before writing, but I promise myself that there will be a stopping point so that I’ll actually write. I create folders for each research thread and add to them as I draft and revise, and also make notes to myself in bold within the manuscript to go back and deepen that research. This way, I can go back later without interrupting the drafting process. For other novelists, I’d say an organization system is extremely helpful—computer folders including annotated notes from books and articles, a browser tab of bookmarks, transcripts from research trips or interviews—as is letting yourself draft without knowing everything. There is always room to go back and fill in any gaps.
I love your essay “No Girls Allowed” in Fairy Tale Review. Among many illuminating moments, I was struck by how and why you’ve felt reluctant to announce your good writing news. You write about publishing your books “quietly” based on some negative reactions you received after publicly posting your career accomplishments. Can you talk a bit about what it’s like, as a woman publishing literary fiction, to navigate this territory?
Valente: Thank you for your kind words about the essay. I think self-promotion is fraught for women because we’re socialized from a very young age to be humble about our accomplishments so as not to threaten men’s egos and expertise, or else to not have any accomplishments at all. In addition, social media is such a complicated space. I participated on an AWP panel this spring on how difficult self-promotion is for women, and particularly for women of color, and we talked about everything from sharing good publishing news to the politics of tagging another author whose work you admire—if tagging is just self-promotion in the end to draw the post back to yourself, if you shouldn’t tag at all, etc. There’s so much anxiety swirling around what to share and what not to share, and though I imagine men feel this too, I don’t know that they experience it in the same way. I think for women publishing literary fiction, there is additional pressure to sell our personalities online, as well as our personal stories. This feels complicated in so many ways, one of which is tied to the perennial question women fiction writers so often receive—is your work autobiographical?—which suggests that women don’t have the same imaginative power as men. And yet, our personal stories matter too, especially in an age when they’re finally coming to light after not being told for so long. Since writing the essay, I’ve tried to be more vocal about my own work, but I also have mixed feelings about social media in general in terms of what I want other people to know and why.
Has your approach to publicity or self-promotion changed over time, or do you still feel the pressure to publish “quietly” as an act of self-preservation? What advice do you have for women or marginalized writers who are preparing to publish now?
Valente: I no longer feel the need to publish quietly. I’ve learned over time that if it’s my work and I’m proud of it, then I should be able to talk confidently about it without relying on others to do so or being fearful that others will resent it. Publishing feels so hard most of the time that it seems better, ultimately, to share the difficulties, the process, and the fleeting successes with other writers. For other women or marginalized writers, I hope that this same sense of community emboldens them—that for as many writers out there who are unsupportive of a writer’s success, there are twice as many who are so excited about their work and for the value of their voices.
Your story collection, By Light We Knew Our Names, was beautiful (and I mean that in all ways, from the writing to the cover design). Do you have another collection in the works, or are you primarily focusing on novels right now? How do you balance whatever book project you’re working on with the stories or essays you also write?
Valente: Thank you! I do have another collection nearly complete, all stories about my hometown of St. Louis. I’ve been working on them gradually over the past five years as research and writing breaks from novel-writing, and they’re mainly rooted in digging up strange stories and buried histories that I never knew about the city while growing up. Magic realism tends to be more difficult to sustain across an entire novel, so short stories allow me the burst of really getting as strange as possible with my fiction. Stories and essays also feel like nice breaks from novel-writing in reminding me how to structure something much smaller, and how to pay close attention to language. While I love the overall, sustained gratification of novel-writing and figuring out the puzzle of structure, I’ll admit that I don’t find the actual sitting-down-to-write of novels all that fun. Writing stories and essays feels much more joyful, and sometimes I need reminding that the writing itself is gratifying as I’m working on the long slog of a novel.
If you had to recommend one novel, one literary magazine, and one short story collection to other readers, what would they be?
Valente: Ooh, difficult question. I’ve read so many good novels and collections lately, and I’m a fan of so many literary magazines (including The Kenyon Review!). But from my most recent reading, I’d recommend Mira Jacob’s Good Talk for the novel; it’s a graphic novel, and a beautiful, humorous and heartbreaking narrative of raising a child in the wake of the 2016 election. In short stories, I loved Kate McQuade’s Tell Me Who We Were, a linked collection that explores nostalgia, the past, and the inner lives of young women, and contains some of the sharpest sentences I’ve read. In literary journals, I absolutely love Iron Horse Literary Review. They consistently publish innovative and cutting-edge work, including themed issues as well as an annual chapbook competition, and they are incredibly supportive of the writers they publish.
Finally, what’s next on the horizon for your writing career?
Valente: I’ve just finished the draft of my third novel (fourth, if you count the drawer novel!). It’s truly a mess and has changed a lot across the two years it took to draft, so it will be awhile before I prepare to send it out. But it’s been a rewarding novel to work on and I’m looking forward to going back into the draft and really ripping it up and revising it. I’ve also completed the second story collection and am working on a series of braided essays, largely centered on the intersection between the environment and human identity.